STRAIGHT GOODS 
IN PHILOSOPHY 

By 

PAUL KARISHKA 




m 




Class _ 

Book 

Copyright^ . 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



STRAIGHT GOODS IN 
PHILOSOPHY 



BY 

PAUL KARISHKA .^^\ 

AUTHOB OF 

"SOME PHILOSOPHY OP THE HEEMETICS," 

"SOME MOEE PHILOSOPHY OP THE HEEMETICS," " EL EESHID," 

"THE TWENTIETH CENTUEY CHBIST," ETC. 

QvsrkJL f^CtLl^rv^ 'fate-.. 



^ 



NEW YORK 
ROGER BROTHERS, Publishers 

1910 



LONDON: L. N. FOWLER & CO 






Copyright, 1910, bt 
DAVID P. HATCH 

LOS ANGELES, CAL. 

All Rights Reserved 



THE TROW PRESS, NEW YORK 



€0!A2594Q1 



CONTENTS 



Page 

Concerning Societies 3 

Three Sources of Happiness 9 

Loving Everybody 11 

A Psychic Truth 13 

The Professional Philosopher 15 

Excuses 17 

Healing of the Body by Mind 20 

The Unit of Force and the Individual 32 

Our Eight and Title in Happiness 37 

What and Who is a Master? 41 

Posing 43 

The Things We Hate 45 

Sympathy 49 

The Funeral of a Living Corpse 55 

Something About Chaos 61 

The Will and Rhythm 65 

Like the Shield of Achilles 69 

Weeds 77 

Waste Places 81 

The Wild Beast 84 

Man and Woman, or Woman and Man, — Which?. 92 

Cheap Verbiage 101 

The Thoughts that Kill 104 

Food Ill 



CONTENTS 

The Value of the Imagination in Life 119 

Essentials of a Philosophic Life 126 

Constellations 135 

Why Women Are Sly 142 

Privileged People 151 

Problems 158 

Fear and Worry 163 

The Jewel in the Toad's Head 171 

The Law of Opposites 177 

The Absolute 182 

Old Age 188 

Our Blessings 197 

The Past ... .'. 203 

What's the Use? 208 



INTRODUCTION. 

STRAIGHT GOODS AND "THE PLAIN MAN." 

Doctors of Philosophy and collegiate authori- 
ties on Psychology frequently refer to the "plain 
man" as distinguished from an individual of 
1 ' trained mind. ' ' By the ' ' plain man ' ' they mean 
the common sense person, who relies on his every- 
day experiences for his criterion, irrespective of 
deep and subtle analysis. The plain man has a 
kind of "horse intuition," using his senses for 
what they are worth, bringing memory to the 
fore as a help in his final decisions. He has no 
interest in the relationship of brain and body from 
a scientific standpoint, nor does he care a farth- 
ing whether Interactionism, Automatism or Paral- 
lelism clinches and settles the whole question or 
not. Whether mind and matter are equal and 
interdealing, as the Reactionist asserts,— implying 
causal relations, sequence, sensational brain event 
and volitional brain event coming one after the 
other, either way necessitating time, priority, etc., 
is not of the slightest importance to him. Nor 
does Automatism stir up in his being any deep- 
seated interest. It is all the same as far as he is 
concerned, if the Automatist succeeds in proving 



ii INTRODUCTION 

that mind depends on body, hanging to the breast 
of it like an infant to its mother, having its * i ups 
and downs," its glooms and pleasures by permis- 
sion of this autocratic flesh, which dominates it 
like a tyrant. If his physical brain takes a notion 
to fall into a stupor he does not care if his mind 
is literally nowhere, consciousness being but a 
secretion, so to speak, of brain itself. 

No, the plain man is quite indifferent to the 
subtleties of brain storms from the automatisms 
point of view. Nor does he lose sleep at night 
in cogitating the great doctrine of Parallelism. 
What business is it of his, if our bodily life is 
"a closed circle in which nervous processes run 
their course between sense organs and muscles 
without consciousness, from beginning to end, 
having anything to do with matter"; denying 
causal relations between mind and matter, resting 
on the assumption that the association between 
the two is quite a different affair. No, the plain 
man keeps strictly out of the wrangle between 
these different schools. The brain event may take 
place before or after he has exercised his volition, 
for all he cares. Body and mind may run para 
or otherwise, the only interest he has in the con- 
test between scholars is the fight itself; to the 
cause that set it going he is supremely indifferent. 

In writing Straight Goods I have been thinking 
a good deal about the " plain man" and his needs, 
therefore I have hesitated to dip continually into 
metaphysics as such, believing that the truths that 
lie there can be shown more clearly under the 
guise of simple thought. Nevertheless I have not 



INTBODUCTION iii 

avoided the problems of down to date contention, 
but have striven to strip them of certain scholarly 
appellations, that serve to make them mysterious 
and out of reach. Psychology, Metaphysics and 
Science have a selected vocabulary of their own, 
and I have endeavored to do some translating 
into simpler English in order to bring their un- 
doubted truths before the eyes of the "plain 
man." For instance, he will have no patience 
with the word ' ' epiphenomenalist, ' ' nor will he 
bother to hunt it out in his pocket dictionary, if 
indeed it is there; and this is only an example of 
many other terms clear enough to the student but 
a botheration to the "plain man. ,, 

The question of Consciousness, the most subtle 
and practically impossible question of psychology, 
is so fraught with mystery that I have practically 
let it alone. Whether Consciousness is really ' ' the 
thing in itself' ' arising under certain conditions 
and disappearing under others; in other words, 
whether it is existence, as some of our thinkers be- 
lieve, is a question open to debate. To the minds 
of some of the Doctors of Philosophy consciousness 
as such seems quite apart from and devoid of the 
element of energy; others again claim that the 
individual Unit of Force necessitated by and co- 
existent with the substance w(e call matter, is the 
"thing in itself," and that consciousness per se 
is only a factor of it, sometimes manifesting and 
sometimes not. Consciousness is so evasive, sub- 
tle, intangible, and yet so absolutely essential to 
any realization of life in activity, that an attempt 
to analyze it is like that of investigating pure ego, 



iv INTRODUCTION 

which is neither here nor there, but apparently 
everywhere in the life of an individual being. 

But dropping this vital question, which like a 
live wire, is beyond handling unless one is gloved, 
I have attempted to deal with subjects of which 
this same consciousness is well aware, and trust 
that I have put them into words that may possibly 
appeal to the " plain man" if to no one else. A 
certain hermeticism is perfectly right and proper, 
but there is another kind of secrecy which is some- 
what farfetched. As this is the day of public 
schools and general education, whatever it is right 
for the mass of humanity to know should be 
thrown upon a screen with a magic lantern effect, 
that "he who runs may read," and not only read 
but understand. Metaphysic, so long lying in 
coma, is undoubtedly waking up. When we read 
science into our psychology, it will emphatically 
assert itself, and become as essential as physiology 
to the education of the modern world. 

And lastly, it is not so much the fact of con- 
sciousness that has concerned me in this book, as 
the facts in consciousness. 



CONCEKNING SOCIETIES. 

Everyone knows that men in combination) often 
work out larger schemes and consummate greater 
undertakings than does the individual per se. 

For practical purposes, a cold-blooded corpora- 
tion, bound by hard and fast rules, soulless, heart- 
less, marching straight on to the goal desired 
without "let or hindrance," is a thing of power 
and wonder. Its unfeelingness is in a sense its 
strength. Societies of any kind, whether close 
corporations, with faces set hard toward money 
making, or men combined in the pursuit of 
science, art or exploration, have opportunities far 
surpassing those of most individuals who go 
ahead alone. Even churches, Sunday schools, 
mystic bodies bolstered by the assumption of 
brotherhood, from the point of material inter- 
action and exchange of favors, have the chances 
on their side, as against him who stands apart. 

Societies are eminently protective of "matters 
of fact" and things of matter. Their parts being 
interdependent, they are self-balancing, and will 
stand for no chicanery or false pretense— that 
is, the majority of them. Of course, there are 



4 STRAIGHT GOODS IN PHILOSOPHY 

exceptions, but I can safely assert that no com- 
bined body can live long unless it is healthy, and 
by healthy I mean honest and true to itself. 

The work of a society has less brilliancy than 
individual effort, as it naturally assumes a level 
that includes all of its constituents. There is no 
sparkling apex or dazzling skyrocket possible 
under the rigidity of its conditions; but its pon- 
derosity and massiveness make it a thing of 
power. It marches on with heavy tread like the 
elephant. The individual only can soar like the 
skylark. 

The world's greatest achievements are carried 
to a finish as a rule by combined and organized 
powers, either of the state, a business corpora- 
tion, or a restricted society; but because of this, 
because of the impossibility of gaining great 
material results without it, by polarity and the 
necessity of balance, there is another kind of 
work that is inherently individual, and will not 
thrive under dictation, or advance by prescribed 
rules. 

Through many centuries, called the dark ages, 
the Church attempted to do the individual's 
thinking, praying, loving and hating for him; it 
looked at man's soul through a spyglass, and 
strove to carve it up with a surgeon's knife. It 
dictated as to what an individual should and 
should not believe; it shriveled the human free 
will and forced upon the intellect the abnormality 
of giving the lie unto itself. This was the climax 
of the "Leviathan" power of church and state, 



CONCERNING SOCIETIES 5 

standing for a massed organism made up of cer- 
tain vitals that breathed and spoke and coerced. 

But the organic tends ever toward dissolution. 
The immortal is an individual. 

To condemn on that account, churches, schools, 
or combinations of any kind, would be absurd. 

Eeferring to the monstrous abuses once author- 
ized by the church and state, serves only to show 
their usefulness. The normal is made clearer 
when we study the abnormal. Corporation and 
combination have their places, and the individual 
has his. Some projects are far better done by a 
body of men, and others by the man alone. The 
army, the mass, would be chaotic without its 
leader, the man. Collaboration is often attempted 
in writing a book, but it is a rare artist who per- 
mits another to handle the brush with him on a 
masterpiece. Many combine in orchestra, but 
the great soloist wings his way upward alone. 

Admitting this to be*, you ask, why debate the 
question? Simply because there is a stage in a 
man's development when he cannot be dictated 
to by a society, nor chained to an "incorporate 
body." Perhaps we should modify this. Out- 
wardly he may honestly come and go in the 
"order," or church or school of thought, but 
diametrically opposed to this— that is, inwardly, 
he is free. 

I have said there is a stage in the soul's de- 
velopment where this is so, but I do not assert 
that all humanity has reached it; in fact, a large 
proportion of human beings are, safely and 



6 STRAIGHT GOODS IN PHILOSOPHY 

rightly, still in the nest; they have not evolved 
wings, and by wings I mean individual character- 
istics that entitle them to fly. A bird makes a 
sorry figure when he flutters and cannot soar. 

But how about those individuals who really 
have the whole empyrean at their command; 
whose wings are strong and equal to the travers- 
ing of endless space? Are they condemned, by 
their power, to a life of isolation? Is there for 
them no nest, no home? Most certainly they have 
a home, but its windows and doors are wide open; 
it is without locks and bars; it is neither cleaned 
with a muckrake nor regulated by a "big stick.' ' 
There is, perhaps, no cathedral crouching humbly 
beneath a monstrosity of dome, where the self- 
emancipated may "toe the mark." No priest 
can excommunicate them, nor priestess set upon 
them her infallible seal. 

Birds meet in the sky and fly in flocks, or wing 
their way alone, as the case may demand; for 
being birds they have the prerogatives of their 
kind and the daring of soaring things. For prac- 
tical purposes— and by practical I mean right 
here, materially safe, financially cautious, com- 
mercially successful, combiningly productive— 
this heavenly way is quite preposterous. If a 
combination of men whose final aim is the soul's 
evolution were to use their consolidation for 
material matters only, having from the point of 
philosophy absolute freedom, and from the point 
of morality or ethical harmony absolute domina- 
tion, I presume they would have permanent sue- 



CONCEKNING SOCIETIES 7 

cess. But thus far, practically all combinations 
that have the good of the soul as their final reason 
for incorporating, presume to say what that good 
shall be, irrespective of that same soul's needs 
and longings. 

From the point of morality or interdealing 
ethically, the society should have absolute author- 
ity; but from the point of the soul's attainment 
and intellectual freedom, the society should have 
no power whatever, positing a cult of independ- 
ence, which in the last analysis is the most binding 
dependence of a self upon itself, for when an 
individual takes all heaven for his domain and 
the earth for his footstool, he must have the 
strength for his own personal sustainment or fall 
back into the arms of the priest and the protec- 
tion of the ritual, mumbling a creed over and 
over, as though it were the last and only word. 

A corporation is an artificial person, made up 
of a combination of persons. Law is its father, 
and its mother is an intangible something that 
holds its parts together, whether they shift 
among themselves or not. She has powers, lia- 
bilities and responsibilities, peculiarly her own. 
A corporation is of the genus of personalities, 
having the power of Unity rather than that of the 
particulars that make it up. 

Now I would ask, how can such an "artificial 
person" be the supreme guide of a man's immor- 
tal soul? For instance— imagine an ecclesiastical 
corporation, made up of saints. This generaliza- 
tion of saints 1 into a composite or corporate unity 



8 STEAIGHT GOODS IN PHILOSOPHY 

becomes supreme dictator as to the evolving of 
souls not designed in the scheme of things for 
the role of saintship at all. An anomaly follows, 
and man stands condemned. 

Now what is a congregation? "Any collection 
or assemblage of persons or things." Specific- 
ally the word is used in a religious sense as a 
gathering of persons for religious worship. Of 
course, in a restricted sense, it may be brought 
under church government, etc., but in its broadest 
aspect, the term stands for freedom. 



THREE SOURCES OF HAPPINESS. 

Do not be shocked! Passionate love, whether 
for country, lover, or child, is always selfish and 
centered on an object. This is a source of 
ecstasy, and its opposite — misery. There go 
along, half concealed with passionate love, jeal- 
ousy, anxiety, responsibility, fear. These com- 
bined make misery, but misery, in its heart of 
hearts, is ecstasy, and worth having, and makes 
life worth living when kinetic periodically. 

The next source of happiness is nature love— 
the power to blend into all sights and sounds—to 
universalize. Its opposite is specialization, which 
comes as pain after a bath in nature's milk. This 
source of happiness produces consolation rather 
than ecstasy, and is longer lived. 

The third is the One Thing. This is the mas- 
ter's chief source of joy, though he indulges in 
the others also. The opposite of the One Thing 
is many things. The One Thing lies in linking 
things. This is the binding power— the creative. 
IT IS HARD. There is opposition in it, resist- 
ance, desperation; but at each snap of the clasp 



10 STBAIGHT GOODS IN PHILOSOPHY 

fastening on another link of the chain. The mas- 
ter knows the supreme joy— that of creation. The 
One Thing includes memory of the past and an 
approximate knowledge of the future. 



LOVING EVERYBODY. 

It is the sheerest nonsense to pretend to love 
everybody, and he who is guilty of the lie of so 
asserting is not worthy of philosophy, except (we 
are apt to say except) he have by that assertion 
a peculiar meaning. 

When you begin to love people en masse, it is 
because you, have consolidated them into an indi- 
vidual, exactly as the cells group in the human 
body. You have made of a community of people 
a grand man, and love them as a being— one. 
This is because you must specialize and symbolize 
in love. You cannot love a crowd as a crowd. 
The orator seeks one face in the pulsating mass 
of humanity before him, and the whole audience 
becomes the body to which the face belongs. 

One loves his country because there is some 
other country that he does not love. His race is 
represented by its flower, and stands apart in its 
typical individual as the chosen people. If you 
love all beings on the planet— earth, they con- 
solidate into one in contradistinction to the 
inhabitants of other planets to whom you are 
indifferent. 



12 STEAIGHT GOODS IN PHILOSOPHY 

God, to be loved, must' bet specialized, personal- 
ized. Therefore, Christ, the individual. This 
altruism amounts to nothing unless it be a con- 
solidated individualism. You love somebody, 
not everybody. You may love a mass of some- 
bodies as a unit, but only because there are other 
bodies that you care nothing about. 

Sympathy is invariably individual, and is in- 
variably spent on a less fortunate individual than 
yourself. We look up to and, possibly, worship 
some one stronger and grander than are we; but 
rarely ever waste sympathy on him unless he be 
in some special way a sufferer or inferior. So, 
then, in teaching, be careful to make this distinc- 
tion. If you search through Hermetics you will 
find this law emphasized. 

Understand then, that an abstraction can never 
appeal to our sense of unity; it is the individual 
that touches the unity, and God was made in 
Christ like unto man, with his infirmities and 
griefs. 



A PSYCHIC TRUTH. 

Hold up a diamond before an expert, and he 
will look upon its flaw. The flaw will be all to 
him. By the flaw will he gauge its value-, by the 
flaw will he condemn it; its glitter and beauty 
will vanish ini the diamond's defect. Let a 
musician listen to another; his ear is attuned to 
discords rather than to harmonies. He listens for 
a slight failing in the tone, a defeat in the touch, 
a skipping of notes; and he judges by the flaws. 
Ignoring the mighty crash of harmonies, he sees 
the humpy mouse of ugliness only which the 
great wave of melody bore upon its breast as a 
beautiful face bears a mole. 

In judging character you are apt to dwell upon 
the flaw, though a mere speck on the white breast 
of a dove. In the critic's eye it grows until he 
is blinded to the beauty and charm of the whole. 
The flaw becomes a part of himself at last, and 
the man judged goes clean and free from pollu- 
tion; the critic has taken his thorn, it has been 
transferred, much to his disgust and amazement. 

Now for a psychic truth, over which I desire 



14 STRAIGHT GOODS IN PHILOSOPHY 

you to ponder. Never look a living creature 
straight in the eyes holding the gaze, unless you 
wish to establish between yourself and it a psychic 
bond. This bond once established between your- 
self and a cat, a dog, a beetle, a fly, a fish, a man, 
causes you to partake, in a degree, its sufferings 
and its joys. You cannot escape, you are bound 
by the gossamer cord of sympathy. 

Oatch not, then, the gaze of a creature that you 
desire neither to hate nor love, suffer with nor 
enjoy* 



THE PEOFESSIONAL PHILOSOPHER 

Every philosopher has a profession; philosophy 
is never his work. "Work is not for philosophy, 
but philosophy for work. Philosophy makes a 
lawyer great, a teacher wise, an artist powerful; 
even a common laborer, divine. To be sure, there 
are doctors of psychics in all colleges, but this is 
not the question. I deplore and pity that man, 
woman, or child, who reverses all things and 
serves philosophy instead of forcing philosophy 
to serve him. 

One may take rest in his profession, he may 
adopt the business of idleness; but if he be a 
philosopher he will know how to do it. Philos- 
ophy will help him to rest. But to be a profes- 
sional philosopher is more grievous than to be a 
professor of religion. Unless a man becomes a 
recluse for a purpose, he should have a business 
among men. This throws him in continual con- 
tact with his kind. The professional philosopher 
should be shunned like the professional philan- 
thropist. 

Eemember, then, that whatever you do, whether 



16 STRAIGHT GOODS IN PHILOSOPHY 

at work or idle, philosophy is at your service, 
and you are its master. Should you serve philos- 
ophy, you will be the meanest wretch on earth; 
for there is nothing so despicable as a servant of 
philosophy and a slave of religion. Force philos- 
ophy to serve you, and you are a king in power. 
I do not argue against the change of environment 
or work, if necessary or desirable, but against 
the overthrow of the work of the world for philos- 
ophy's sake. 

Philosophy should touch up all work, of what- 
ever kind, with gold and silver. Philosophy 
means wisdom in work; it is a key, a grasp, a 
means, a passport. To devote yourself to philos- 
ophy, is to be a fool; to force philosophy to serve 
you, is to be wise. 

The philosopher makes over environment, 
adapts easily to circumstances, transforms con- 
ditions, forces object, and colors and tints ugli- 
ness with beauty. 



EXCUSES. 

Show me a man who is not given to making 
excuses for his shortcomings, a man who is calm, 
and I will stamp him as great— rare. Is gold 
easy to find? Are diamonds as cheap as glass? 
Is beauty an everyday commodity? The man 
who is constantly excusing himself is conscience- 
stricken, and therefore is not great. 

Let us analyze. What is the origin of an ex- 
cuse? Simply a secret feeling that you have 
allowed indolence and self-love and other vague 
reasons to take the place of a duty left undone. 
You have neglected something, and you realize 
it. Then you hunt around to find an excuse with 
which to veneer yourself. The very fact that you 
wish to cover yourself with the varnish of apology 
shows that you have something to hide. Ver- 
bosity is the legacy of the apologist. He lathers 
himself with words. Does he sin against himself? 
Does he over-eat, over-drink, over-sleep? Does 
he neglect the essentials of health and unfit him- 
self for his working life? Behold, how he bubbles 
with the foam of excuses. Does he forget his 



18 STEAIGHT GOODS IN PHILOSOPHY 

friends? Is he ungrateful? Has he abused con- 
fidence? Has he stolen, lied, cheated, maligned, 
broken promises? How tender is he of his own 
faults; how he gushes with self - justification ! 
Strange, nevertheless, he is harsh with others, 
making no allowance whatever for their short- 
comings, having no charity for their self-indulg- 
ences. 

Are excuses never excusable, then, you may 
well ask? Earely. Why the excuse? If you have 
done evil, or caused evil, directly or indirectly— 
why not admit it, and condone it? Why spit 
upon a] child's dirty face, and call it washed? A 
great man often does evil, and frankly says so; 
but he seldom tries to adorn his ugliness with an 
excuse. 

People excuse themselves out of hell, out of 
heaven, out of education, out of fulfilled ambition. 
"I might have done this or that," they say. "I 
might have had this or that if it had not been 
for so and so," "Circumstances were such," "my 
situation was thus and so." Yes, yes, yes, we 
understand. We hear it also in matters of philos- 
ophy. "When we get this matter straightened 
we shall start once more;" as if a philosophy 
were not the very solver of problems, the panacea 
of woes. This travesty on philosophy were indeed 
amusing, were it not so pathetic. You excuse 
yourself from concentrating, from persisting, 
from willing even; and by you, I mean everybody 
who does. 

The habit of making excuses grows on one 



EXCUSES 19 

until his characteristic look is that of a man who 
is hunted by creditors. He dislikes the reaping 
of his own crops sown in laziness, and so he says, 
"Excuse me." It is a polite phrase, and is well 
enough as a pass word; but please do not use it 
sincerely. The tendency to inertia is in man as 
it is in a stone. Effort is effort, and he is ignor- 
ant who expects great achievements to spring 
from the soft head of laziness. The skull of Jupi- 
ter from which Minerva sprung was hard, and 
had to be split with an ax before (with tremen- 
dous birth pangs) the goddess could be born. 



HEALING OF THE BODY BY MIND. 

In the first place, what is body? Second, what 
is mind? And, third, what is healing? 

Body, according to the accepted idea, is "mate- 
rial organized substance, whether living or dead. ' ' 
It is "physical structure.' ' More generally 
speaking, it is apparently "inert matter.' ' 

Mind is "that which feels, wills, thinks— the 
conscious subject, Ego— soul;" specifically it is 
"intellect as distinguished from feeling.' ' 

Healing is "cure— means of making whole.* ' 

Having defined the terms, we discover that we 
have but a superficial knowledge of them after 
all. When I say body is "inert matter," I know 
it is not vital principle per se, but discovering 
what it is not, is in no way demonstrating what 
it is. A horse is not a dog— yet what is a horse? 
A flower is not its perfume nor its color— what is 
it then? In the last analysis no one knows what 
matter is. Physicists have plenty of hypotheses 
in regard to it, and for want of exact knowledge 
are obliged to rest content. 

Again, in the last analysis we are grossly ignor - 



HEALING OF THE BODY BY MIND 21 

ant about mind. We realize some of its powers, 
and' are aware that it is diametrically opposed to 
that which we call matter; but the ultimate 
"mind stuff,' ' what is it? Naming it energy, 
force, consciousness, motion, dynamics, etc., is 
simply substituting other terms, without solving 
the problem. Secondary, experimental compre- 
hension of mind is reasonably easy, but an under- 
standing of its primal nature is beyond us. 

In regard to healing or cure— whether it be rad- 
ical or superficial, is a question also. The soothing 
of a body into a temporary adjustment of its 
parts to each other, so that pain subsides, is not 
necessarily a cure. The animal organs have an 
accommodating way of helping each other, or 
accepting outside assistance, taking on all the 
assumptions of wholeness, when in reality they 
are far from normal or complete. 

False teeth in the mouth, soon forgotten as 
such, grind away like a genuine set. A man 
adopts a Cork leg, and gets quite in accord with 
it, or even two Cork legs. Spectacles are perched 
on the nose, and an individual reads small print 
as though with normal eyes. The human stomach 
puts up with all sorts of insults, and adapts itself 
to unreasonable condiments. The palate learns 
to like what it naturally hates, for the sake of 
peace; the nose, for the same reason, endures and 
enjoys the rankest odors. All this goes to show 
that we may think we are healed, when in reality 
we are not. For the sense of comfortableness and 



22 STEAIGHT GOODS IN PHILOSOPHY 

adaptiveness of tlie body is easily mistaken for 
wholeness 1 or health. 

Having discovered then, that body, mind, and 
cure are too deep for us to sound as to what they 
really are, we are driven to treat the subject from 
the standpoint of experience only, dropping at 
once the momentous question of their elemental 
values. 

But experience is a term of tremendous import. 
Experimental knowledge is in its infancy. We 
are as ignorant as Hobbes as to what effects will 
result from new causes till we put them to» the 
test; but once finding out, we are sure of fixed 
facts, and a law that never fails. Experience, 
then, gives us stability through the unfailing law 
that goes with it, and inspiration to push ahead 
for new thrills in untried fields not yet explored. 

Returning to the subject of body, mind, and 
healing, we find that we have from the standpoint 
of our common ground, matter or body as one 
pole of our being, and dynamic mind for the 
other. Now the question is— can healing be 
achieved, by the pole mind, on the other pole 
matter or body? That is, have the poles power 
over each other? If so, has mind more power 
than matter, or vice versa? Which dominates, or 
does neither? 

Let us start with the body. Does it, can it, 
affect mind? I am arguing now from the com- 
mon ground of consciousness and knowledge, not 
from the impossible base of what mind and 
matter in their finality really are. I am arguing, 



HEALING OF THE BODY BY MIND 23 

too, from my own personal experience, believing 
by analogy that my experience is likely to be the 
lot of my fellows also. 

From the common sense standpoint, then, I 
discover that my mind is exceedingly susceptible 
to the condition of my body; if the organs are in 
harmony with each other, doing the fnll share of 
work assigned to them, I am well, and my mind, 
as far as its house of flesh is concerned, is quite 
at ease. On the contrary, an insignificant ail- 
ment—a toothache, a pin prick, a corn, or a slight 
attack of indigestion, will unhinge my thinking 
powers, and unless I am hypnotized into ignoring 
my trivial pain, or am strong enough to will it 
down, it becomes excruciating and overthrows 
my mental equilibrium. 

Reversing the picture, what is on the other 
side? Suppose, for instance, my conscience 
troubles me, or I am in deadly fear, or am raging 
mad, or desperately bereaved— my digestion 
becomes impaired, my head aches, my nerves are 
prostrated, my heart palpitates, my sight is dim; 
in fact, my whole body loses its tone and is seared 
and blasted by the cyclone in my mind. 

Interaction between mind and body is a fact 
firmly established by experience, and accepting 
this as truth, are we putting it to practical use, 
simply allowing this interaction to go on haphaz- 
ard ; or are we bringing our will to bear upon this 
law? That is, are we pitting law against law? 
for there is as surely the law of will, as there is 
that of relationship. 



24 STBAIGHT GOODS IN PHILOSOPHY 

Now the individual mind, as such, has a Unit 
Will— one; but the individual's body, on the con- 
trary, has a million or billion wills, as the case 
may be. Physiology, biology, all the up-to-date 
"ologies and isms' ' that pertain to body show 
the countless individuals that go to make up the 
material cell life of that combination dominated 
by the unit called Man. His " living environ- 
ment" of flesh, absurdly called inert matter, is a 
world of individuals of all sizes, shapes and 
powers. So the many-willed body of a human 
being is but the pole that lies opposite and paral- 
lels the one^willed mind. Query— Can the domi- 
nant will of mind regulate the multiple wills of 
body, or vice versa? 

As before said, our experience is yet in infancy. 
What new effect will be born from a pregnant 
cause, we have yet tot learn. The causes of today 
are the effects of yesterday, or in other words, an 
evolution. Latent powers in mind are being real- 
ized. Living matter, or rather moving matter, is 
only half explored. 

But setting all this aside, and accepting man 
as he accepts himself— a Unit, or individual com- 
posed of body and mind or "dust and energy," 
interacting, inseparable, polarized— finding by 
experience that his mind can be tortured, even 
unbalanced, by his body, and his body almost 
murdered by his mind— what is he going to do 
about it? 

I am not intending to investigate abnormal 
cases, where martyrs burned at the stake have 



HEALING OF THE BODY BY MIND 25 

dominated their suffering by radiant spirit, where 
a man of science of the Galileo stamp has suc- 
cumbed in the torture chamber and lied in the 
face of truth; for these only go to show that 
exceptionally under great stress and strain, the 
element of time being a factor, the body comes 
uppermost triumphantly, or vice versa. I shall 
simply consider an ordinary, everyday, sick-and- 
well man, with an individual will running para to 
colonies upon colonies of other wills which make 
up his body, and belong to him by right of unity. 

Yes, his body belongs to him, matter belongs 
to him— he cannot exist apart from it in some 
form; but his possessions are conditioned and 
subject to the law of the organic, and the prin- 
ciple of relativity. He has something more than 
a vested right in matter, he has an inherent, 
eternal right. It is the other half of himself— the 
live half, that stands for the many balanced ever- 
lastingly against his Ego, the one. But because 
that half of him is the many and he himself is 
the one, equilibrium between the two is hard to 
keep. One or the other pole is likely for the time 
being to dominate, and the warfare since Adam, 
of fighting the flesh or mastering the spirit, is 
going on continually with all save those who have 
learned the art of balance between the two, or 
approximate poise. 

The great error lies in the idea— never in the 
least borne out by facts— that one or the other 
pole should be annihilated. A Schopenhauer 
would kill the will or mind, and a Brahman zealot 



26 STKAIGHT GOODS IN PHILOSOPHY 

would crucify the body; a modern priestess would 
deny that same body a right even to be; and a 
modern phallic worshiper would immerse mind 
in the symbolic fetish of sex. 

But the sane, honest thinker, who looks on both 
sides of the question, demands fair play between 
the poles of himself, and strives by experience to 
find out at just what point body and mind reach 
a moving equilibration. He does not say to his 
body, "You take mind in hand and heal and domi- 
nate it," nor to his mind, "You force body to 
health," in defiance of its indestructible law of 
relativity. On the contrary, being no fool, he 
recognizes the principle of the organic, and allows 
it freedom to accomplish its healing work, if 
possible, in its own way. 

This abnormal forcing of body to play the part 
of mind, and mind to play the part of body, is 
what does the mischief in the attempt at cures of 
either one or the other. 

The question, then, sifts down to this: If body 
has its own self-governing law, namely, that of 
rhythm and relationship, adapting its parts, with 
perfect accord one with the other, resulting in 
harmony,— how shall man know when the like- 
wise eternal law of discord is opposing it? 

The answer is simple. In the majority of cases, 
pain or discomfort is the newsbearer. 

"We condemn pain, we deny its right to be, we 
even lie unto ourselves and pretend that it is 
not; but perhaps if we realized that this much 



HEALING OF THE BODY BY MIND 27 

maligned messenger is often a life-saver, we might 
not class it hereafter among the unmitigated evils. 

Without pain) we should probably have no way 
of ascertaining the disorder and chaos of the 
body, and would therefore fail to apply remedies. 
By applying remedies I do not necessarily mean 
medicine, though there are cases where both 
medicine and the attention of a specialist are 
absolutely essential to a restoration of harmony. 
The organs, tissues and nerves cry and shriek for 
help in the voice of pain, and the mind proceeds 
to obtain assistance. In numerous instances, 
however, pain comes as a caution and warning 
to mind to let body entirely alone; to cease feed- 
ing and over-using it, thus giving it a chance 
through its law of adaptability to readjust and 
heal itself. 

The office of mind, then, in reference to its 
other pole of body, isi to treat it scientifically, 
that is rationally, not interferingly. 

Learn by experience and investigation the in- 
herent rights and relationships of the organs of 
matter that make up your physical structure, 
and let the law of them have its fair chance. A 
body that can evolve itself is quite likely to be 
able to* look out for itself. The best kind of mind 
cure is that just one of recognizing body cure. 
If the mind once realizes the dignity, wonder, 
mystery of matter in organization, it will surely 
see also the stupendous law of the organic that 
acts within it. A man becoming fully conscious 
of his body's inherent power as body, will trust 



28 STKAIGHT GOODS IN PHILOSOPHY 

it long enough to practically let it alone, barring 
accidents or exceptional cases, and will find him- 
self in the same category with the healthy child 
of a savage, whose mind is yet too slightly devel- 
oped to materially interfere with his bodily func- 
tions. 

The real mind cure method has a "mind your 
own business' ' basis, that is, a recognition by 
mind of the rights and powers of matter, as the 
other pole of itself. Once getting this insight, 
and treating the body as powerful and self-ad- 
justable, at the same time recognizing the inter- 
action between itself and mind, man might live on 
indefinitely and in comparatively sound health. 
Always alert to recognize the signs of pain, not 
morbidly but scientifically, helping body in any 
reasonable way, by medicine or otherwise, when 
the help must be had, letting it alone when it so 
demands,— in fact, treating it as a man should 
treat his wife or a lover his eternal mate, watch- 
its rhythms and guarding against its passions,— 
he ought to become a Methuselah and inhabit 
the earth for centuries. By science, fair play, 
and a growing experience well used, he ought 
also to get rid of that bugbear called old age, 
with its brittle arteries, gray hairs, and toothless 
jaws. Knowing balance or poise, the mind should 
never permit the body to go the pace that leads 
to disorganization; the body should be allowed 
liberty, not license. 

Healing, then, would better be called balancing, 



HEALING OF THE BODY BY MIND 29 

or an establishing of equipoise. Body and mind 
should be good friends, splendid running mates; 
but as it is now, one seems everlastingly trying 
to get the better of the other, and the individual 
owner of them both finds it convenient to grow 
old or die "without let or hindrance." He per- 
mits his body to become debauched and carrion- 
fed, and groans because he is chained to a house 
of flesh; or, on the contrary, allows his body no 
rights at all, and wails because it cries out in 
pain. He denies that there is any "dust" what- 
ever, and becomes an oracle without its temple. 
Mind is married to matter, and cannot escape, 
so what is the use of flying from one state to 
another in frantic effort to obtain divorce. Far 
better is it for a man to establish amicable rela- 
tions between the polarities of himself, learning 
by experience how to apply the inherent laws 
of either justly and fairly, thus striking an 
approximate balance that assures him sound 
health, escape from old age, and more years than 
he will care to count. 

Though there is certainly a law of the organic, 
and a principle of balanced relationships, there 
is another law that works towards dissolution. 
Should we look more closely we shall find that 
these apparently two principles are really but 
one. An over tendency to organize and relate 
would outreach itself, as a house may be built too 
tall, or a person grow too large to adapt to the 
environment about him, consequently going to 



30 STRAIGHT GOODS IN PHILOSOPHY 

pieces from congestion or over-production; as if 
the organizing principle could say, "I have over- 
done this, I must tear it down, get back to orig- 
inal matter and try again." So after all, the 
law of dissolution may be but a serviceable aspect 
of the law of synthetic structure. 

But right here comes the mind's opportunity to 
heal, or balance body. If a man finds himself so 
large he cannot enter a door or associate with his 
kind, he well knows that dissolution is near by, 
and if he as mind does not interfere, then the law 
of body will take a hand and dissolve the house 
of flesh and reorganize. 

In fact, experience and athletic balance will 
show him a thousand ways to keep the other pole 
of himself adaptable to the world's environment. 

I have previously stated that if body made 
itself, it probably knows how to take care of 
itself. This sentence is prefixed with an if. But 
whether it made itself, in the womb of the mother 
who fed it the material with which to< organize 
and construct, or the future tenant— the ego that 
took possession— attended to its upbuilding, or 
God by his fiat demanded that it should be, makes 
no difference in respect to its inherent power to 
hold itself together in harmony with the Ego 
that makes use of it. Whatever the power that 
was back of the miracle of organized body, it, 
having capacity to produce such a wonder, 
most certainly has genius and strength enough 
to maintain it. Disharmony is undoubtedly the 



HEALING OF THE BODY BY MIND 31 

cause of its breaking up, and harmony that 
which holds it together. If man then gets some 
understanding of the law-working power that 
built his body, he is pretty likely to be able to 
maintain it intact as long as he so desires. 



THE UNIT OF FORCE AND THE 
INDIVIDUAL. 

What is a Unit of Force? What is an indi- 
vidual? 

To the first question I answer promptly, that 
force per se I know nothing about, neither do you, 
nor any other. Whence it comes, how and why, 
are questions beyond the power of intellect. 

What we do know, however, in its secondary 
attribute is energy or force manifested in that 
which we call matter. Now a Unit of this energy 
or manifested force, would seem to be a certain 
prescribed amount, a quantitative expression. But 
this is no answer. I must look deeper. A unit 
wonld be better defined as a quantitative possibil- 
ity; that is, a generative power equal to a fixed 
value. But again, I am in a quandary. Does 
it not take power to generate power,— force to 
generate force? 

Well, then, I must go round in a circle and say 
that there is an eternal Unit of Force, with a 
constant power to express (a better word, per- 
haps, than generate) a fixed value; and I do not 
posit this from any knowledge we have of 



THE UNIT OF FOKCE AND THE INDIVIDUAL 33 

force per se. Ora the contrary, I reason from 
our knowledge of energy or force in matter. If, 
then, we have units of energy, that is, fixed quan- 
titative values of energy expressing themselves 
through those which we call individuals, what is 
an individual? Answer: An individual is some- 
thing which cannot be divided. It is determined, 
and has identity and continuity. It is a being- 
One. It stands in a sense for independence and 
egoism. In other words, it is a Unit of Force 
either latent or active. It is not exactly a lump 
of coal with a quiescent power to burn. It is 
not necessarily combustion bottled up. Kinetic 
it will act, and latent it will sleep; but either 
way and beyond and above both, it is self-ener- 
gizing, no matter how, whether from drawing on 
outside resources, such as food and air, or inner 
resources*,— electrical or magnetic. Its power to 
so draw is not the stuff utilized, but something 
that cannot find its explanation in the interaction 
or assimilation of material or electrical products. 
I have a habit of presenting man as an illustra- 
tion, though a Unit of Force is not necessarily 
human. 

Man, then, from an experimental standpoint, 
and as far as we know, is a Unit of Force called 
an individual; that is, he has a limited, but 
constant power to generate energy, or rather to 
express it, beyond and above the material called 
to his assistance in so doing. In other words, the 
builder of the fire called man, is not the fuel 
nor the dissipated energy that results therefrom. 



34 STBAIGHT GOODS IN PHILOSOPHY 

Neither the combustion nor the manifold expres- 
sions accruing, are the individual Unit manipu- 
lating the same. But while he is not, in one 
sense, the result of his own doing, in another 
sense he is. 

Now here we must think closely. Something 
comes from this constant redistributing of energy, 
everlastingly necessitated by this limited but con- 
stant amount of unknown, dynamic impulse behind 
it. What is it? It is the other half of the indi- 
vidual or the indivisible— his world, self-created 
and inseparable from him. It is the many of 
himself polarized to the One or Ego. But "the 
many" you say, are egos, too*, self-willed, and not 
his own unit. True, but they are within the field 
of that unit's energy, as we are in the field of 
the Universal energy; that is, the man's inner 
world and the unit of productive energy are eter- 
nally inseparable. 

But here a more difficult problem presents itself: 
How can a quantitatively fixed unit of energy go 
on to infinity producing phenomena? We must 
remember right here, that the limitation in man's 
productive power, dynamically considered, does 
not lie in time as a whole, but in a fraction of 
time. That is, at any given time, man is limited 
to a given accomplishment, according to his power 
to express in matter as energy. His force would 
seem almost to be numbered, as a unit-energy of 
say two, four, or six capacity. Remember again, 
that I am dealing now with his fullest capability, 
not with that possibly expressed; for more likely 



THE UNIT OF FORCE AND THE INDIVIDUAL 35 

than not he allows to lie dormant, unused, or lat- 
ent, a reserve power, like money in bank, not 
drawn upon unless the occasion demands. 

If my position be correct, that man is a Unit of 
Force sitting centrally, so to speak, among his 
creations,— in one sense dominating his expressed 
field of energy, in another sense dominated by it, 
—individual in that he and his world of energized 
things cannot be divided; individual also in that 
his generative power is constant and true to- itself; 
myriad and self willing in that within his field of 
energy he can manipulate its expressions and cre- 
ate or lie dormant through a regulated rhythm, we 
have, as an individual unit, an apparent contra- 
diction which the real thinker resolves into a 
paradox. 

As man, then, you are a being with exhaustless 
resource, limited, nevertheless, by time and num- 
ber. As though behind you were an eternal spring 
of life-giving water, that you are forced to imbibe 
through a pipe restricted in size, yours might be 
a four inch, mine a two; you in one instant have 
twice the quantity that I obtain, yet that does 
not prevent my obtaining your quota a moment 
after. The element of time and all that goes with 
time, such as space, quantity, quality, modality, 
etc., are the restraining elements; that is, man's 
manifested world, even in himself, strikes hands 
with restrictions at once, and his unit of indi- 
vidual energy, while unrestricted as to its inex- 
haustible power of indivisibility and resource, is 
a force of constant and fixed value from its point 



36 STRAIGHT GOODS IN PHILOSOPHY 

of expression. Kemembering that a paradox is 
not a contradiction, and that in the Unit of Force 
itself is the unassailable law of polarity, I believe 
that as far as science and experience have gone, 
my hypothesis of the individual unit per se is 
beyond dispute. 



OUR EIGHT AND TITLE IN HAPPINESS. 

In one kind of happiness we as individuals 
have an inherent right and title, in another we 
have not. 

The object of life is life, and its elixir is happi- 
ness. 

In the realm of relativity the rule holds good 
that the greatest happiness to the greatest num- 
ber is as near the ideal as can possibly be reached, 
as relativity by its very nature implies immense 
misery, whether or no. Relativity implies a con- 
dition where many people are striving for the 
same thing. Whether it be wealth, fame or love, 
there are always plenty of contestants in the 
game, and some must of necessity go to the wall. 

One who enters the more active forms of life 
knows intuitively that he must fight every step of 
the way towards that which he wants, as many 
others will be reaching after the same thing, with 
perhaps as good a right as he. In the quieter 
forms of life the game will perhaps be less intense, 
nevertheless he will have to play it, and play it 
too with his eye on the happiness of the greatest 
number. If not the happiness most certainly the 



38 STRAIGHT GOODS IN PHILOSOPHY 

greatest good, for the realm of relativities is 
subject to great and little, high and low, good and 
evil. 

Now the other kind of happiness, that to which 
you have absolute, inherent right and title, con- 
cerns your own particular self irrespective of 
others so far as the happiness goes. This happi- 
ness comes like dew from heaven upon) your soul, 
when you have done a great, good or self-sacri- 
ficing act. It results not from the attainment of 
what you want necessarily, but more often from 
yielding your personal desire to the general good. 
This happiness is the reward, inherent, of un- 
selfish virtue, a certain revelling in virtue for her 
own pure sake. Now we are not preaching a 
foolish self-sacrifce that pampers the selfishness 
of others. On the contrary, we condemn this as 
unjust, and a breeder of misery to the one who so 
abases himself as to lie prostrate that his fellows 
may walk over him. What we mean is quite 
different. It is the giving up one's personal 
desire for the general justice and good of another 
or others, when by so doing a greater amount of 
happiness is resultant than could otherwise be 
obtained. Any person so doing, if occasion de- 
mands, attains, himself, the supreme bliss of 
virtue for its own sake, and distributes a larger 
number of special delights among his kind, than 
could otherwise be experienced. Even more, he 
often averts a great evil which might result from 
selfish indulgence. To illustrate: A man becomes 



OUE EIGHT AND TITLE IN HAPPINESS 39 

rampant with a special desire— good, perhaps 
ennobling in itself, but which cannot be realized 
without appalling results to others. He may long 
to found an orphan asylum, or endow an "Old 
People's Home." By a little sharp practice in 
business, wrecking many homes thereby, he 
achieves a fortune and consummates his desire. 
Let me tell you it will be long— long before he 
attains the absolute happiness of "virtue for its 
own sake' ' after such shady procedure. A woman 
loves a man who is married. She too perhaps is 
married, but not to the man she loves. Now this 
love of hers may be sacred, per se— God alone 
knows, but she has no right and title in the happi- 
ness which it brings. Its shadow rests on the 
home of another. Through her Karma has she 
arrived at her present condition in life, and in 
the relativities no happiness is legitimately hers, 
that brings injustice into the lives of others. Nor 
will she- taste of the absolute bliss, while allowing 
special unholy delights to enamor her, to the 
extent that others concerned are affected. This 
works with man the same. 

Ambition is a good thing, and fame, and the 
laurel wreath most splendid,— in honest competi- 
tion worthy of a God. Contest in the open, where 
sly tricks are unknown, and everything is fair 
and square, is health giving and stimulating. 
But a battle won, like a love, through unfair 
means, inconsiderate of justice and the rights of 
others, cuts one off at once from his title in this 



40 STEAIGHT GOODS IN PHILOSOPHY 

absolute, self-respecting happiness, which conies 
to the virtuous through the practice of virtue. 

Do not imagine for a moment that a special 
happiness is not a good thing; on the contrary, 
any special object you desire, that rightly and 
justly can be attained, is a joy. It is not the 
absolute, inherent happiness to which you are 
entitled through sure service of virtue for her own 
sake; but a special, acquired right— say the pas- 
sion of love for a person, the acquisition of wealth, 
the privilege of travel, the attainment of fame or 
honor; these come by fairly are often sources of 
supreme delight, accompanied, however, by the 
dread o£ the loss of them. This dread acting as 
a shadow to foil the sun. 

The happiness of self-sacrifice has no such 
shadow, and being an inherent right, rather than 
an acquired one, it is the more stable of the two. 
Nevertheless the acquired right to a special hap- 
piness is its own excuse for being, and is to be 
sought with all one's energy. 



WHAT AND WHO IS A MASTEK? 

The characteristics of the master are emphat- 
ically expressed. Let us enumerate some of them: 
First and pre-eminent is poise or balance. The 
master in private life is in a jungle of complexity 
—more than any other man, because his power 
draws all kinds of humanity to him and tests his 
mastership at once. Now mark you, if he can ad- 
just to such a state, being pulled as he is in all 
directions, by a medley of human beings, and can 
keep perfect poise, never yielding principle— at the 
same time realizing that this principle of equity 
applies not only to himself but to these others 
also— showing no unjust bias or partiality, using 
tact in a pre-eminent degree, not only tact but 
sympathy and kindness, he has one of the great 
attributes of a great man or master. To test him- 
self he must be in the crowd, among his kind, fol- 
lowing his ordinary line of duty. To get along 
alone is very well, but to work out and realize his 
supreme power, he must be with others,— those 
that by right and duty he has associated himself 
with 1 . A master avoids ultra things as far as 
possible. The problem of everyday life is hard 



42 STRAIGHT GOODS IN PHILOSOPHY 

enough without making it harder by devious and 
unusual ways. The master avoids eccentricity 
and abnormality, realizing perfectly that there is 
enough that is strenuous without cultivating it. 
If he wants a problem, he finds it anywhere, in 
the simplest things. 

As before said, the master has many character- 
istics, but they base on poise. However great he 
otherwise may be, or how much of a genius, with- 
out this balance mastership is impossible. 



POSING. 

You read pages of nonsense and gush, but what 
proof? "New Thought" abounds in statements, 
assertions and positions embellished with "dear 
one" and "sweetheart," but proof— where is it? 
It is perfectly proper to make an assertion, and 
any thinker can ferret out its self-evidence. It 
is perfectly proper to present data which any one 
interested can verify; but when a lecture is given 
or book written that is neither self-evident nor 
verifiable, unless the writer calls it dream or 
belief, it is balderdash. I may be as assertive as 
Cromwell or Swedenborg, if I call it my "belief" 
or my "fancy," but should I present this stuff for 
bald fact or science, I deserve ostracism by all 
sane, progressive minds. There are some things 
very cheap in this world, and posing is one of 
them. 

A philosopher is either a child or a worker. He 
is never a creature of assertion. If he gets inspi- 
rations he is exceedingly careful about presenting 
them, unless he can bring verification; for he him- 
self can scarcely know that they are inspirations, 
till they have been proven. 



44 STRAIGHT GOODS IN PHILOSOPHY 

Cranks are breeding more and more of their 
kind,— lazy humanity opposed to giving value for 
value. 

Here is a formula: Psychic impression is very 
real when it equals either demonstration— fact, or 
self -evidence; otherwise it lies over against possi- 
bility or absurdity, and if given out, should be 
qualified with the words "may be" or "can't be." 

Psychic impression equals fact— demonstration. 

Psychic impression equals self-evidence. 

Psychic impression equals fiction or dream. 



THE THINGS WE HATE. 

If you watch matters of fact, you will notice 
that people are very apt to have taken from them 
that of which they have become very fond, while 
the things and jobs they hate, stay persistently 
by them. Why is this? If I am fond of a thing, 
there is a good reason, and that same reason is 
likely to make another fond of it also; complica- 
tions arise, and the loved thing, person, or job 
is often lost. We hate a thing,— some person we 
have to live with, or some work we have to do, 
and it holds us, as does the fly-paper the fly. 
We " can't seem to get rid of it." Allow me to 
contradict you, however, you can. If you are a 
teacher, a lawyer, or a housekeeper you will most 
likely be relieved of your job, when you learn to 
love it. Become extremely interested, so much so 
that you really hate to quit, and some fine day you 
will find yourself down and out, and you will be 
sorry, too. Of course you will find compensation 
and be glad later, perhaps, but you will grieve 
for your loved and lost, nevertheless. 

Now here is the philosophy: So long as you 
complain and grumble about the work you have 



46 STBAIGHT GOODS IN PHILOSOPHY 

to do, no matter whether "it be washing dishes, 
teaching school or trying eases, you are liable to 
keep on doing it. But when you find the element 
of delight that is most surely concealed in even 
the meanest work, you are liable to find yourself 
outside it. The reason philosophically is, that 
you have rounded it out, completed and fulfilled 
it. A man or a woman might persist along a cer- 
tain line a hundred years and not find its un- 
doubted merit, as would perhaps another person 
in a decade. You are not through with a job 
when you hate it, and- it being at the same time 
your enemy, is not through with you. If you quit 
it in that frame of mind, you will continually 
revert to it with a dissatisfied, indignant feeling 
that will embitter your whole nature. That un- 
mastered work will haunt you as all unmastered 
things in your sphere do. The fact that you 
could not and would not assimilate that which 
was legitimately your work by the law of cause 
and effect (the cause being your own karma by the 
way) is like repudiating your own offspring. If 
you are in the least wise, you will find, if you 
want to* really lose that hated thing, job or per- 
son, you will have to realize it even to the point 
of love for it; otherwise if you quit with it appar- 
ently, you will be obsessed by it nevertheless. 
You are not through with a thing till it receives 
its due, and it is certainly not through with you. 
The equation has not been struck otherwise. 

Now this does not refer to jobs, persons or 
things that you have not undertaken. Should 



THE THINGS WE HATE 47 

you start seriously to master Euclid, proceed a 
way in it and then give it up, you have failed in 
fulfilling your karma. The fact that you started 
in the study making a causation out of it and a 
link in your chain of experiences, implies that it 
is yours indefinitely. If, however, you " steer 
clear" of a thing, person, study or job, that very 
steering clear in itself — yes, the avoidance, is 
again a link in the chain of your karma. There- 
fore that which you find yourself actually en- 
gaged in, proves, because you are so engaged, 
that you have come to it normally and causally 
and must really find the lovable in it before you 
can pass it by. 

How about evil, you say, under this philosophy! 

The trouble with an evil thing, person, study 
or job (evil in itself we mean) is that you love it 
too much. You would never stay a moment with 
evil, if it had not a diabolic charm. The good that 
lies in every evil you have found, and are gloating 
over and exaggerating. Now by this love you 
can and must escape this very evil itself. If it 
be an abnormal habit like lust, or lovei of drink, 
love it to excess, and it will turn and rend you 
either by disgust or by death. The reaction from 
it will be either your cure or your extinction. 
This same rule applied to a good thing, person, 
study or job (good in itself we mean), shows 
that you are, when the love seems very secure, 
liable to lose it. 

So, if you would retain a treasured person, 



48 STRAIGHT GOODS IN PHILOSOPHY 

study, thing or job, do not love it to excess; and if 
you would be rid of a loved evil, love it to the 
point of satiety, and it will fly from you and set 
you free. 



SYMPATHY 

To be "lost in another" is not to dispense with 
one's individuality. On the contrary, the Ego. 
thus seemingly submerged, is in reality intensified. 
People to us are after all environment; even our 
nearest and dearest are outside objects with which 
ourselves as subjects, are in sympathy. The "I" 
or Ego of man is only such because of an environ- 
ment apart from it, and such a condition as that 
of complete merging or absorption into one's sur- 
roundings, whether person or otherwise, is impos- 
sible if the "I" or Ego maintain itself as such 
in consciousness. That element of difference 
which proves that the "Me" is never the "not 
me" is the very field of consciousness itself. 

Now when I sympathize with my friend, I am 
not lost or absorbed by him; on the contrary, 
he is a sort of addendum to my inner world. I 
have annexed him and set him up as an idol in 
my shrine. Looking closer; I find that I had him 
before I had him; that is, in me was the niche 
where he was to be by the very nature of myself; 
in me was the absolute possibility of accurate 
response to one such as he. I had waited for bim 



50 STRAIGHT GOODS IN PHILOSOPHY 

through the eternities. He and he only could 
rouse to life a mertain "Me" that must otherwise 
have slept. Now this apparently disinterested 
sympathy which I feel for him is in reality sub- 
limely selfish,— nobly, honorably selfish. It is not 
the selfishness that cheats others through my 
acquisitions; on the contrary, it is the appropri- 
ating of that which is legitimately mine, — as 
much so as the air I breathe and the light by 
which I see. 

This friend to whom I seem to be sacrificing, 
is in reality rebuilding or readjusting my inner 
world; overhanging it with divine skies; painting 
it with ravishing sunsets; opening entrancing 
vistas; and revealing haunting perspectives that 
otherwise would have been unknown. He gives 
nothing but myself to myself; that is, he becomes 
the mirror by which I see the principalities just 
outside the narrow confines of my former world. 

So this friend, this being for whom my sym- 
pathy is unquenchable, is really after all but the 
reflector of my previously unrealized self. As if 
I had lived ages upon ages without viewing my 
own face, when suddenly spying it in a still pool, 
I discover the color of my eyes, the sheen of my 
hair, the curl of my lips, the texture of my skin. 
Though I never see myself in the glassy mirror 
of the lake again, I have added to my inner world 
the vision of a face which was really mine before. 

Any thing or person that can extend and enlarge 
our possessions in consciousness (and of what 
value whatever are they to us as individuals out 



SYMPATHY 51 

of consciousness), with that person or thing we 
sympathize. I think I must revise this sentence. 
Anything that can extend or enlarge our posses- 
sions pleasurably in consciousness, calls forth our 
sympathy; and this makes it quite apparent 
that anything that extends our inner dominion, 
unpleasantly arouses antagonism or lack of sym- 
pathy. That is, if I look into a pool of still 
water and discover myself ugly, I am obliged to 
carry along the picture and hate it accordingly. 
So whoever or whatever jostles into conscious- 
ness some despicable part of me that previously 
lay sleeping, I repudiate it then and there, but fail 
to get rid of it, nevertheless. 

I have sympathy for those only that stir some 
latent good that is in me into activity. There is 
an old saying: "Hate the sin, but love the sin- 
ner." Even those pretentious persons who claim 
to love indiscriminately and universally, have to 
rest on some such maxim, for they dare not love 
the sin. In their repudiating of evil I have proved, 
beyond disputei, that they do not love everything. 
The most punctilious saint shows a fine dainti- 
ness continually as to what he likes and hates ; he 
is constantly picking and choosing, and though 
his tongue prates of universal love, his acts give 
the lie to his pretension, and show him to> be self- 
deceived if not in the fullest sense a deceiver. 

Now there is such a thing as universal apprecia- 
tion, but it is strictly of the intellect and not of 
the heart. When we say love, we are in the realm 
of feeling, where all humanity, as well as things 



52 STRAIGHT GOODS IN PHILOSOPHY 

inanimate, are selective and sympathetic. Scien- 
tifically, I am as interested in the plague of small- 
pox as in the scent of a rose, but emotionally I 
repudiate one and gloat over the other. We are 
not intellectually sympathetic; we are intellec- 
tually curious, just and impartial. Emotionally, 
however, from the aspect of loving and hating, 
our sympathy and repugnance run rampant. 

He who preaches a doctrine of universal love in 
lieu of selective sympathy, is no true student of 
human nature, and cannot prove his point by any 
living or inanimate example. The very nature of 
individualism or multiplicity in life, is repulsion 
and attraction; otherwise there could be no con- 
sciousness as we know it, and no debate) upon the 
subject whatever. If a man is sufficiently identi- 
fied to even discuss the question, he is in the whirl 
of interchangeable life' and therefore in the realm 
of feeling, which means love and hate. He him- 
self is being roused continually, as he evolves 
among his kind, into a bigger and bigger Ego in 
consciousness— not bigger in reality, but in possi- 
bility of given experience. In other words, he 
is repudiating or sympathizing with things and 
persons as they reveal by their impacts himself 
untoi himself. 

Can he control his sympathies, you ask? Yes, 
to an extent. That is, if I get a glimpse of my- 
self in thei mirror, and fear that the picture will 
make me too happy or too vain, I can refrain 
from looking again, studying and revelling in its 
special features. So, on the contrary, if I find 



SYMPATHY 53 

ugliness, I need not curse myself continually with 
the vision, but may turn my eyes away. Herein 
lies the power of will or freedom over sympathy 
and its opposite, making us responsible for our 
loves and hates. 

An important question arises at this point: 
How about a generalized sympathy, that is, sym- 
pathy for a group or a race? The answer is 
simple: It is always the Gentile as against the 
Jew, or vice versa. As soon as you combine a 
number into unity, you again have a One,— an in- 
dividualized "not you" as the environment or 
object of you yourself— a big mirror, but a re- 
flector nevertheless. You may generalize to any 
extent, except that of universality. Something 
must be polarized to that other something called 
yourself, lest consciousness be impossible. When 
you love the world in toto it becomes a Unit— 
One; you yourself are another, and the world 
upon worlds in the vault above, still others. By 
no possible arrangement can you escape "the 
many" in feeling and comprehension and be con- 
scious of them at all. In dealing with the uni- 
versal, you apparently step outside it, and line it 
up against you like balanced poles of one and the 
same thing. 

Sympathy is a "fellow feeling," and is not 5 
necessarily pity, though it often takes this form. 
Our feeling of compassion for some one is never- 
theless a self-revelation. I go* down into the 
valley of bereavement with my friend, and draw 
from it a strange consolation. In sharing his 



54 STRAIGHT GOODS IN PHILOSOPHY 

trouble I am not only making his burden lighter, 
but mine also, which some day I shall have to 
carry on my own account. My possible vale of 
grief has been revealed to me through his, and 
when my time of suffering comes I shall escape 
the shock that otherwise I must feel. "I have 
been there before," I shall say to myself, "in the 
misery of my friend." So* even that aspect of 
sympathy which we call pity has its somber 
advantages and is not repudiated. 

There is a limit, however, to our power of pity. 
Beyond that limit we resent such emotion and 
despise the person who> is unstintingly drawing 
from our well of tears. Justice calls a halt, and 
bids us ascend from the vale of grief and bask in 
the sunlight on clear heights. Every person we 
meet sympathetically, in some special way needs 
us; in some one point is our inferior,— less strong 
than we. As a being or unit he may be our supe- 
rior, but if he makes draughts upon our pity and 
love, he has most certainly a lack that we can 
make up to him and in so doing the rich residue 
of himself becomes a reflector to our inner eyes, 
revealing to us our otherwise unexplored country. 



THE FUNERAL OF "A LIVING CORPSE," 

The Twentieth Century makes emphatic asser- 
tions, among others that philosophy, oratory and 
poetry are dead. Bacon, Kant, Spencer, have 
rounded out philosophy, there is nothing more on 
that subject to be submitted,— it is dead. Demos- 
thenes, Cicero and Webster have completed the 
circle and possibilities in oratory,— it is dead. 
Sappho, Keats, Poe, have fulfilled the mission of 
poetry,— it is dead. Now having disposed of these 
flowers of culture, let the people gird up and 
begin " doing things.' ' 

But possibly the Twentieth Century is hasty in 
its judgments. That which seemed to have died 
has perhaps not been critically examined. No 
expert has his finger on the pulse of the "corpse." 
After all it may still be alive and dormant, like 
the hibernating bear. Something is stalking the 
land, hunting game, calling itself philosophy, 
poetry, oratory, and the world laughs. 

This travesty has no sense of a syllogism, no 
respect for logic and fact, yet labels itself philos- 
ophy. It has no roses of Pieria, yet calls itself 
poetry. It has no persuasive "golden tongue," 



56 STEAIGHT GOODS IN PHILOSOPHY 

yet presents itself as oratory. So the human 
shakes his head, winks, shrugs his) shoulders, and 
says, "dead! the real thing is dead!" 

The old masters in philosophy since the Renais- 
sance, had a way of burying themselves to 
prevent actual interment. A thinker can find a 
temporary grave in words, if he so desire, and is 
sure in that way of a periodic resurrection. The 
shallow mind will never bother about him, but 
the miner for genius and thought is bound to> dig 
him out. So the philosopher perpetuates himself 
by hiding. The common, everyday man, up to 
his ears in work, is most surely not spending his 
nights over the abstruse postulates of the Critique 
of Pure Reason or the metaphysical "reactions" 
of Hegel. Those men and their thoughts, as far 
as he goes, are dead and returned to whence they 
came. Nor will he moon over Sappho and Poe. 
How can he, when his own power of imagery is 
sound asleep. Therefore, the poets are corpses, 
on rather wraiths. Nor will he read the speeches 
of Patrick Henry or Clay. He does not respond 
to nerve tickling words and rounded periods. He 
is "doing things." The orator is extinct. 

Well then, if the blossom is dead because I am 
blind and cannot see it, if melody is dead because 
I am deaf and cannot hear it, if philosophy is 
dead because I am thoughtless and cannot grasp 
it, then I, too, must be on the verge of collapse. 

Two reasons are the cause of this absurd judg- 
ment on the Muse by the Twentieth Century: 
First, the age is pursuing practical ends, and its 



THE FUNEBAL OF "A LIVING COBPSE" 57 

energy is spent along those lines. Second, and 
growing out of the first, the age is asleep in cer- 
tain of its faculties. It is not a question of the 
death of philosophy, oratory, poetry, after all; on 
the contrary, the case is reversed. The Twentieth 
Century is- atrophied in regard to them. It has 
hut a faint capacity of response, and therefore 
asserts that these arts themselves are no more. 
If my ears are stopped and I cannot hear a mus- 
ical rhapsody, the stark corpse is not the body of 
the sound, but I myself. This being so, the 
travesty of these apparently dead wonders has its 
golden opportunity and proceeds to use it for all 
it is worth. Everywhere are doctors of philos- 
ophy without a consistent cult. Everywhere are 
poets without the poem, orators without oratory. 
There are books upon books, in this Century, 
full of "pronouncements" on philosophy; volumes 
weedy with assertions that are not self-evident; 
judgments not founded on discovered facts, and 
reasoning without logical premise. Therefore, 
the world wags its head, puts a finger to its brow, 
and laughs. There is verse and verse— yards and 
yards of it— rhythmic, clean-cut, crystal clear, 
but like a glass of water: You look through it, 
and searching, find a blank. Being like water, it 
has no fire; it cannot burn. The world says trash, 
and laughs again. Well groomed men stand on 
platforms and "orate." Their coats are well cut 
and funereal. Their gestures go to prove their 
close dealings with some school of dramatic ex- 
pression. Their voices are persuasive; their 



58 STRAIGHT GOODS IN PHILOSOPHY 

throats well oiled. Their words are picked and 
matched like gems in a necklace. They make no 
"holy show" of themselves, sawing space and 
tearing their hair. They are altogether well- 
mannered, and the people who compose their audi- 
ences get up and go out, one after another, bored 
to death. Why? Because in these orators there 
is no "do or die" earnestness, no defiant intent to 
carry the people en masse on the wings of their 
words. Their flying machines are out of order. 
There is something wrong with the soaring gear. 
If they themselves are incapable of rising, how 
can they expect to lift the dead weight of an 
irresponsive crowd along with them? 

Philosophy has a strange way of resurrecting 
itself periodically, just as an individual gets up 
in the morning after a good night of sleep. And 
the world has a peculiar habit of recognizing it, 
after its energy has been withdrawn from some 
other object. 

Absolute inertness is unthinkable. A stick of 
wood burns when the match is applied. If there 
was no real need of philosophy in the world, it 
would surely die. But, as a cult or philosophic 
belief is simply a means to an end— a formula or 
set of formulas toward smooth living— a guide to 
the line of least resistance in the path men travel, 
and as the world cannot get on without it, the 
apparent corpse of philosophy is, after all, only 
shamming, and mankind is deluding itself when 
it pronounces it dead. 

Poetry has an equally uncanny way of reap- 



THE FUNEKAL OF "A LIVING COKPSE" 59 

pearing and charming earth with its syren voice,— 
possibly in the distant echo of the steam whistle, 
the far, ominous cry of the motor, or the dull 
reverberation of the whirring wheel. Poetry is 
not always where the sun sets, or the rainbow 
vanishes. The Muse sometimes strokes the brow 
of the plough-boy and rides alongside the man 
of the plains. She digs with the miner, and flashes 
her fires on the laborer at the forge. She breaks 
in upon the monotony of a practical people, and, 
lifting her wings, flies over skyscrapers and shops 
by the side of the aeronaut. She even transforms 
the skyscrapers themselves into towers and tur- 
rets, and makes the heart of a great mart of trade 
into a castellated center of dreams. Dead? bah! 
Poetry is not always touching wine glasses. She 
is often sweeping a floor. Her language is not 
that of platitude, nor her tongue that of syllables. 
I can very well imagine the men of the present 
age, those who make history, coming together 
decently to attend the funeral of philosophy, ora- 
tory and poetry, symbolized by a composite 
corpse. Flowers are brought, a few tears shed, 
a grave is dug, when unexpectedly, the dead 
becoming "quick;" it sits up in its coffin and 
looks about. It is the very Muse itself, resem- 
bling all those who have followed in its wake. 
There is a Baconian touch upon its brow, a glance 
like that of Spencer in its eyes, a Kantian pose of 
its head, a Sapphic smile on its lips, a Markham 
grip of the hand, and as it salutes the new century 



60 STEAIGHT GOODS IN PHILOSOPHY 

a timbre in its voice like the great tone® of a Lin- 
coln or Demosthenes. Dead! The Muse dead! 

The funeral is a farce. The men of action are 
transfixed. The travesty on "the real thing" 
slinks to cover. Philosophy stalks the land and 
proceeds to practice what it preaches; its skeleton 
—fact and logic, its body— self -evidence. Poetry 
burning with divine fire sings as she sang before 
on the Greek islands: and the Scotch heath. Ora- 
tory discards platitudes and proceeds to uplift 
and win. The hustling Twentieth Century finds 
to its astonishment that the Muse itself is suf- 
ficiently alive to "do things,' ' and that these so- 
called things having a well-fixed stamp upon 
them, are potent and imperishable. 

Well, then, Mr. Matter of Fact, take off your 
funeral gloves and dismiss your pallbearers. The 
undertaker must wait awhile before he lays out 
the Muse and fills in the grave. 



SOMETHING ABOUT CHAOS. 

Harmony, the end sought in life, can only be 
found through chaos. This sounds paradoxical, 
to say the least; let us investigate and see. 

In the first place monotony is not harmony; 
monotony inevitably brings about discord. Har- 
mony is only found through an eternal readjust- 
ment of things — a continuous re-relationship. 
Why? Life in a sense is motion, and motion ne- 
cessitates constant change. Harmony being a con- 
dition realized in life pure and simple, must there- 
fore be coincident with change. Now there is no 
change, however slight, unless it has in it some 
element of chaos. Re-relationships mean a break- 
ing up to unite again with a shade of difference, 
and this breaking up is chaos. Harmony, while 
not itself chaos, is nevertheless impossible with- 
out it. It is the other side of chaos, and when 
we ignore its right and principle, while viewing 
the phenomena of life, we have our eyes fixed on 
monotony, which is sure to breed a cataclysm. 
"When a thing becomes so static that it seems 
monotonous, it is bound to go to pieces, as far 
as human effort is concerned. The mind by its 
dynamic quality can never endure an interminable 
condition or thing, even the divinest, without 



62 STRAIGHT GOODS IN PHILOSOPHY 

making an attempt to alter it, and this attempt 
results in chaos or a restoration through cyclonic 
readjustment to harmony itself. 

The eye cannot dwell perpetually upon one pic- 
ture, though, it be the face of an archangel. The 
ear will not tolerate a continual sound, though it 
be the trumpet of Gabriel. The mind revolts at a 
continuity without its element of difference, and 
to get this difference it resorts to chaos. In this 
very chaos itself there is a tragic charm and 
splendor irrespective of the new order of things 
it is bound to establish. 

There is a savage joy in overturning— tearing 
down, uprooting. Nature in a mild way is con- 
stantly burning up and rebuilding. Man himself 
grows from a child by this process; he is a per- 
petual wonder of chaos and cosmos. From an 
infant he becomes a youth, all new as far as his 
material make-up is concerned; and then a man, 
new again, made over and over, his face, hands, 
hair, eyes, continually taking on fresh aspects, 
wrought by the sculptor Chaos into* a harmonic 
unity adapted to his environment and demands. 
And what Nature sometimes takes years to do, in 
a fit of hurry and enthusiasm she again accom- 
plishes in a few weeks. She rejuvenates a person 
in fever by burning him to a skeleton and piling 
new flesh on his bones. She rearranges a land- 
scape by destroying its topography, thrusting up 
baby islands to the surface of a sea and leveling 
an old crag into a promontory. 

There is affinity in the soul of man for the 
terrific, the terrible; the reckless joy won from 



SOMETHING ABOUT CHAOS 63 

the " spice of danger' '* is no vain thing. The 
"poet" who sings in platitudes and swings to a 
pendulum is, after all, no poet whatever. The 
primal law of chaos balanced to harmony has 
never been revealed to- him by the Muse. When 
the storm comes and Nature rages, he hides his 
head under his undeveloped plumes and shivers 
with fright. But the real lover of life, the stormy 
petrel, with wings long and pointed, and power 
of sustained flight above all soaring creatures, 
follows the phantom ship that furnishes him 
sustenance. Across the immensities he goes mid 
lightning, thunder, boiling seas and scowling 
clouds, finding no land anywhere for his tired feet. 
On, on, beating his pointed wings in teeth of the 
gale, through the night, through the day he 
travels. Chaos, tearing the clouds to ribbons, 
gouging out great caverns in the waves, riding 
on the bowsprit of the ship, snapping the masts, 
ripping the sails, hissing amid the yards, running 
across decks in balls of fire, engulfing, booming,— 
a veritable God of rapture and despair,— is to this 
wild petrel of the sea of life a Muse of majesty 
and unquestioned power. 

There is no use talking, gentlemen,— you who 
prate of unqualified harmony and a static love,— 
you cannot sail on a placid sea of bliss and be con- 
tent,— no, no, no. Your Poes and Dantes must 
show you hell, that you may "balance up" to 
heaven. Your lotus lands and your drugs are the 
stagnant things of earth; they have the odor of 
the tomb. 



64 STRAIGHT GOODS IN PHILOSOPHY 

Chaos is evil, deadly, terrible, but without it 
there is nothing good; in fact in its final reaches 
it is itself most good. Chaos is the hag that car- 
ries an angel in her womb. Chaos is darkness with 
light in her eyes. Chaos is fury that hugs prolific 
peace. Chaos is destiny that hides the star of 
love. Chaos is the wrath of God. 



THE WILL AND RHYTHM. 

What is Will, and what is Rhythm? A man's 
will detached from the force used in executing 
it, I define as desire— wish. Rhythm is included 
in the law of action and reaction; it is the swing 
between the poles of being, or all opposing atti- 
tudes manifested in life. From these definitions 
it would seem that will and rhythm are diamet- 
rically opposed to each other, the former standing 
for freedom and the latter for law— necessity- 
fate. 

As I have before argued, a principle contains 
within itself its opposite or tangent tendency. 
For instance, the so-called centrifugal force is but 
the normal result of the persistent centripetal. 
Centralization overdone, so to speak, by its very 
nature throws off, and the independents thus dis- 
carded follow the centrifugal law, which is noth- 
ing other than the centripetal reversed. Very 
well, then, let us look at this question of rhythm 
and will from a similar point of view. Will, 
desire, or wish, seemingly independent of the law 
of rhythm, is nevertheless immersed in it. Were 
it not for the rigidity of action and reaction, there 
could be no sense of freedom. The rebellion of 



66 STEAIGHT GOODS IN PHILOSOPHY 

will or desire to the strict requirements of rhythm 
is hinged upon this very strictness. Rhythm, like 
the centripetal force, overdoes itself, and the inde- 
pendent will or freedom is born. This seems far- 
fetched, hut let us see. What is this dualized 
force with its poles called centripetal and cen- 
trifugal, hut another name for action and reaction 
or rhythm? And what is this rhythm in toto hut 
another name for necessity and freedom. Action 
and reaction being the true balance between the 
centralizing and repulsive tendencies, this central- 
izing and repelling power, by its very nature must 
of necessity be polarized to another element 
inherent in itself, namely, freedom— will. The 
rigidity of the law necessitating equality between 
the action and reaction of energy, gives that same 
energy its loophole of escape, or an element of 
freedom. This we call free will, desire or wish, 
for necessity could never for an instant be with- 
out it. Why? If all actions and reactions had 
no meaning or reason for being save to act and 
react, and there were no opposing element in the 
nature of such motion, as far as consciousness 
goes, the universe would become motionless; but 
as will pure; and simple is not energy per so, and 
as energy per se is but the stress and strain in 
substance, there is a point— nodal or surdal— 
where they neutralize, and here desire or will 
or freedom— whatever you choose to call it— has 
its being in consciousness. The very conditions 
of action and reaction could not be without this 



THE WILL AND EHYTHM 67 

turning point; and here the unknowable third ele- 
ment appears, which we call Will. 

But coming down from the metaphysical aspect 
of this question into the conscious life of man, I 
find him restricted exteriorly and free within; 
his very freedom again necessitating his restric- 
tions. Why? Being a Unit of Force, not the 
Unit of Force, there are others like himself inter- 
nally free, with wills and aspirations also. Now 
that the many may he free in this great sea of 
"Oneness," each having the same right of liberty 
as the other, exteriority they must be restricted; 
that is they limit each other, and rhythm and 
interaction of necessity follow; not that only, but 
desire or will itself by its very nature is craving 
for a special,— some thing or things as distinct 
from other thing or things. Inwardly I may in- 
dulge this will or wish to my heart's content. I 
am free to desire whatever specials I choose, but 
let me once proceed to act my longing, that is, 
energize this wish and send it rampant into the 
realm of objectivity, and I bring up against limita- 
tions on every side. Other wills as inherently 
free as my own are ranged against me. I find 
myself in a sea of tides, struggling with rhythm 
and nearly drowned in the rise and fall of objectiv- 
ity. Things toss me about like a derelict— the 
actions and 1 reactions of others are regulating my 
own; matter in all forms of vibration is asserting 
its rights; wheels are revolving within wheels, and 
paths are crossing paths— the boundless freedom 
of "the me," pure and simple, is circumscribed by 
some other "me" interiorly like unto myself. 



68 STRAIGHT GOODS IN PHILOSOPHY 

Yet without this restriction brought about by 
external objects, there could be no interior free- 
dom to desire anything at all; and without this 
interior freedom to desire a thing, there could be 
no objects whatever in our conscious universe. 



LIKE THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES'. 

"He gnashed his teeth, 
"Fire glimmered in his eyes, 
"Anguish intolerable wrung his heart, 
"While he put on his glorious arms— 

"The labor of a God. 
"His broad shield uplifted last, luminous as the 

moon, 
"Such as to mariners a fire appears kindled by 

shepherds 
"On the distant top of some lone hill. 
"Such, from Achilles' burning shield divine, 

"A lustre struck the skies." 
This armor was forged by Vulcan, for the god- 
dess Thetis to present to her son Achilles. 
"He fashioned first a shield massy and broad, 
"Toiling with skill divine. 

"There he described the earth, the heaven, the sea, 
"The sun that rests not, and the moon full-orbed* 
"There also all the stars that round about 
"As with a radiant frontlet bind the skies; 
"The Pleiads and the Hyads, and the might of 

huge Orion; 
"There discord raged, there Tumult 
"And the force of ruthless Destiny. 



70 STKAIGHT GOODS IN PHILOSOPHY 

' i There too he formed the likeness of a field 

' i Crowded with corn, 
"In which the reapers toiled, 
"Bach with a sharp-toothed sickle in his hand: 
"There also, amid a pleasant grove 
"A pasture formed, spacious 
"And sprinkled o'er with silver sheep. 
"To these the glorious artist added next 
"A labyrinth of dance, such as of old 
"In Crete's broad island, 
"Doedalus composed 
"For bright-haired Ariadne; 
"Last, with the might of Ocean's boundless flood, 
"He filled the border of the wondrous shield; 
"The armor finished, bearing in his hand the 

, whole 
"He set it down at Thetis' feet. 
■ ' She like a falcon from the snowy top 
"Stooped of Olympus, bearing to the earth 
"The dazzling wonder fresh from Vulcan's hand. 
"Now rose the moon in saffron vest attired 
"From Ocean, with new day for gods and men, 
"When Thetis at the fleet of Greece arrived, 

"Bearing that gift divine!" 

The great in philosophy,— the master, he who 
knows himself and life, is protected by a shield 
that reflects all earth and sky as did that of 
Achilles. His armour is forged by Vulcan in the 
deeps of experience, and bearing it before him, he 
is invincible and secure. Unless his mother,— the 
Thetis, in whose womb he slept, places this pan- 
oply at his feet, he is helpless in waging war on 



LIKE THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES 71 

his enemy; but once attired, and his shield,— " the 
labor of a God", uplifted, "he gnashes his teeth, 
Fire glimmers in his eyes, ' ' and ' ' though anguish 
intolerable wrings his heart/ ' the battle is his 
and his alone. 

It is a fact that no man dare face the dangers 
of life without some form of protection. He is 
on the defensive and he knows it. Even the sav- 
age has his crude and ghostly religion as a barrier 
between himself and the onslaughts of the world. 
His shield may be covered with animal hides 
"seven deep," but it protects him from head to 
foot when pushing his way through the labyrinth 
of life. True, it does not reflect the sun from its 
bosses, nor the pale glamour of the moon, nor is 
there a pictured ocean at its rim. Wheels within 
wheels, perhaps are wanting, but it is "seven 
deep" with hides, and serves the purpose de- 
manded by his childish soul. 

Again there is the shield of the common man, 
with the ritual of his church or order engraved 
upon it,— an amulet strong enough to ward off 
any enemy deeming him worthy of attack. All 
fighters have shields; only the inherently protected 
go outwardly unprotected. 

To dare the world, the flesh and the devil is to 
defy every thing or person with a will differently 
disposed from your own. It is Troy challenging 
Greece, and Greece challenging Troy. The instant 
you start to blaze your own trail, north, south, east 
or west, in the journey of life, death stalks beside 
you. Instinctively you shield yourself, and push 



72 STBAIGHT GOODS IN PHILOSOPHY 

on. A shaft strikes here arid is warded off, 
another there and rebounds. From head to foot 
are you covering up your naked self, lest a vital 
part be hit. Of course there are sheep! Follow- 
ers are on all the grazing places of earth, and 
though they are without panoply, the shepherd 
who fights their battles and does their thinking 
is armed from head to foot. 

All cults that have made their way, and have 
not gone down before the world's onslaughts, have 
had masters protected by shields and helmets cun- 
ningly fashioned, more or less strong, and now and 
then invincible. If there is anywhere a weak spot 
in the armor of a leader of a religion or philos- 
ophy, the opposing world is bound to find it, and 
only that system stands the onslaught of centuries 
whose prophet carries before him an invulnerable 
shield. A little teacher or preacher comes and 
goes with a blare of trumpet and glitter of steel; 
he rushes forth to battle with conventional life 
followed by a "pack of sheep"; "his massy 
shield o'ershadowing him whole, Ten circles bright 
of brass around its field." But later another 
teacher or preacher carrying another shield with 
ten more circles of brass, crushes him in the dust, 
and the world encores and laughs. The question 
is perfectly self-settling. If a man cannot stand, 
he can not, that is all. His shield may ward off 
destruction for a time, but he finds later that death 
was only sparring. The fatal blow is bound to be 
struck, and his faith and himself overthrown. He 
has had his little day. He has gone into history 
as a corpse. He is not immortal. 



LIKE THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES 73 

But a shield like* that of Achilles, forged by a 
God— " luminous as the moon", is the matchless 
wonder carried by him, master or man, who can 
blaze his own trail, and maintain his own position 
as against the world. If his mother Thetis 
descends from Olympus and pleads with Vulcan to 
settle "his ponderous anvil on the block— one 
hand with his huge hammer filled, one with the 
tongs," a shield with "five strong folds" will be 
forged, as invincible as destiny. All splendors of 
earth, sea and sky will be reflected from its mass- 
ive front— flashing defiance to the very objects 
which it dares to< mirror. 

To huge Orion in the sky, another "huge Orion' ' 
on Achilles' shield sends challenge. 

To the sun in heaven "that rests not" another 
restless sun flings its resplendent rays. 

To the "moon full-orbed" another moon as lum- 
inous, stares daringly. 

To the stars above,— "The Pleiads and the Hy- 
ads", the stars upon this deep sheen of moving 
panoply flaunt greeting. 

To Discord, Tumult, ruthless Destiny, the 
raging furies of Achilles' shield throw down the 
gauntlet. 

And to the fields of whispering corn and grow- 
ing grain on earth's warm stretches, the summer 
glories on the shield's perspectives wave their 
greeting. 

And to the groves and pastures l ' sprinkled with 
silver sheep," the living, moving wonders of Vul- 
can's masterpiece give answer. 

Even bright-haired Ariadne on Achilles' shield 



74 STRAIGHT GOODS IN PHILOSOPHY 

is dancing as once aforetime "In Crete's broad 
island' ' she danced and dallied. And on it too 
the ocean falls and rises, as boundless as the 
mighty flood on earth's great bosom. 

He who faces the whole world of objectivity and 
dares it, must be himself the whole world. Greek 
meets Greek. Any honest armor is better than 
none, when man goes forth to fight the battle of 
life; but that which is forged by a God is beyond 
compare. 

■ . . • • • . 

How shall I know, you ask, whether I have 
donned this) indestructible panoply or not? And 
I answer, by watching those who fall and those 
who stand. Look into common life and common 
things and learn a lesson. Is there any one more 
absurd than he who talks with giant superlatives 
about the wonders of mathematics, and like 
Hobbes, tries to square the circle, when a simple 
problem in arithmetic or algebra is beyond his 
power of solving? Who more ridiculous than he 
who prates of chemistry and never investigates its 
synthetic combinations? Who more laughable 
than the man that fools himself, in regard to biol- 
ogy or physiology or geology or astronomy or 
psychology— having shut his mind to all discov- 
ery, resting complacently on the data of the past. 
A teacher arises head and shoulders above the 
crowd that surrounds him, and rants in "high- 
farutin" phrases and platitudes without self- 
evidence; drives home logic, based on a ridiculous 
hypothesis, or a self-asserted premise built from 



LIKE THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES 75 

no known fact. He is cased in an armor, and 
carries a shield "seven hides deep." His voice 
is loud and far reaching, his foxy eyes glance side- 
wise, he shows his teeth, he strikes at hidden ene- 
mies, lurking in mid-heaven— demons of air and 
sunbeam ; he piles climax upon climax, as he soars 
on the wings of speech; he manipulates words so 
shrewdly that he seems to his appalled disciples 
the very God. His tin helmet glitters, his "pol- 
ished greaves" flash, his corslet throws fire. His 
great sword slung from his shoulder in full view, 
menaces and frightens. Altogether this teacher, 
with head and shoulders above the crowd, seems 
invincible; but let some one, no matter how hum- 
ble, protected by a shield like that of Achilles, and 
armored by Vulcan, challenge him, dare him to 
enter the arena where dialectic wrangles are toler- 
ated and truth brought to* light, and he plays the 
role of martyr at once, and "dies the death." 
Why? Because the panoply of an Achilles is 
bright and on the shield all things in heaven above 
and earth below are as they are. 

It is a bold revelation. The shield is a mirror 
that reflects the truth, not pleasant always, but 
nevertheless truth. It stands the test of the sharp- 
est scrutiny and closest investigation. Micro- 
scopic and telescopic eyes but bring to clearer view 
its startling accuracies. He who dares to gird on 
such armor dares to face fact. It is not learning 
that entitles one to it, it is freedom from prejudice 
and a willingness to< be a peer of the universe as 
it is, in all its myriad specializations and moods. 
He who lifts up a shield like that of Achilles is 



76 STRAIGHT GOODS IN PHILOSOPHY 

without delusions, but has the open mind. He is 
the fighter, cutting his way through the resisting 
world by sheer force of truth. The gods are on 
his side— God. He may fall a thousand times, but 
no power can hold him down. His flashing shield 
mocks and blinds his enemy as does the full-orbed 
sun; its ocean waves of light engulf and disturb 
him; "The Pleiads and the Hyads and the 
might of huge Orion burn into his very soul,— its 
Discord, Tumult, ruthless Destiny make havoc of 
his life. The armor of the Gods has laid him 
low! 



WEEDS. 

My neighbor hails me and demands that I cut 
down my poplar trees— anger in his eye, scorn on 
his lip. Why? "Because they shed their leaves." 
Have you ever been to France, I ask, or Italy? 
"No." "Well, let me alone then, for what is 
Lombardy without its poplars, or what am I?" 

This question of taste produces various effects, 
some good others bad. If all people admired 
the same type, all men's wives would look 
alike, all husbands would be counterparts, there 
would be few marriages by the way, houses would 
be uniform, trees all of one species, cats all of one 
stripe. It is well then that men disagree in mat- 
ters of taste, for the awful uniformity of material 
things bred from unanimous opinions in taste, 
would level the human mind to inane monotony— 
a sea without a wave, a desert without a hill. If 
I like sweet fennel and my neighbor prefers cat- 
tails, the stranger who passes, caring neither for 
my neighbor nor myself, is nevertheless charmed. 
But when a whole block of neighbors becomes 
enamored of one idea, and that idea is a shaved 
palm tree, I pity the stranger. To his untutored 
eye it would seem that a trade's union painter had 



78 STRAIGHT GOODS IN PHILOSOPHY 

varnished the whole lot of them, and if perchance 
he be an artist, I pity him yet more. 

According to a great philosopher of the present 
era;, humanity is forever seeking a moving 
equilibrium, whatever that may mean, and if this 
be so, it is also true that in seeking they contin- 
ually bound back and forth between extremes. 
Through this tireless polarity we get diversity in 
taste, and from the tout ensemble of variety 
beauty shows her eyes. If, however, at any time 
nature's instinct to versatility is disturbed and 
the matter of uniformity is taken in hand by man, 
we get results to be sure, but such results! Gar- 
dens with flower-beds modeled on five^-pointed 
stars, houses with wings exactly alike, chimney 
pots of the same height, gargoyles with the iden- 
tical grin, wall paper repeating its pattern till 
the sick are made insane, carpets ditto, streets 
straight, hills leveled, valleys raised, ditches 
boxed, weeds annihilated — but, my subject is 
weeds. 

The Century Dictionary defines weeds as those 
herbaceous plants which are useless and without 
beauty or especially those which are troublesome. 
It further says that the application of this general 
term is relative. Handsome plants, such as the 
oxeye daisy, cornflower, and the purple cowwheat, 
are weeds to the agriculturist, flowers to the 
esthetic. The exotics from cool countries are 
sometimes weeds in the tropics. 

So then I will not allow my neighbor to con- 
demn me for cultivating weeds, so long as I raise 
them on my own side of the fence. My eye simply 



WEEDS 79 

gloats on the cheap, sun-dreading morning-glory, 
a climber so beautifully wicked that it fears the 
full light of day, except perhaps in Egypt, where 
it dares the very noon itself. I gloat on its deli- 
cate diabolism, its deuced purple and white 
determination to strangle some useful plant, and 
have its early morning passions and presump- 
tions in spite of the scowl next door. I gloat over 
my straggling democratic nasturtiums that claim 
prior right to all lands entailed or unentailed, 
wherever they can by squatting get a foot-hold, 
staying for Ave years or a hundred, proving 
possession in their case to be nine points of the 
law. 

I admire the courage- of weeds, their radical 
methods, their brass, nor do they bluff and blow 
without cause,— a veritable sprawl of beauty,— 
shocking to conservative plants, an almost shame- 
less display of enticements that establish effects 
in " local color," "bright patches," etc., being 
amorously sought for by artists the world wide. 

My neighbor objects to> the falling of my poplar 
leaves, and denounces them as litter. True, they 
are a bit untidy, and lack the beauty of New Eng- 
land death in October when the frost has painted it 
until it becomes an illusion and seems like golden 
russet life. Between two evils which shall I 
choose? A cleanly disposed tree that deliberately 
changes its clothes once a year and airs itself 
naked in the meantime, or the evil of no magnifi- 
cent stately poplar at all, a monotonous barren- 
ness, a glare, a cement sidewalk, and a pair of 
dark goggles for my eyes. Which evil? Why the 



80 STRAIGHT GOODS IN PHILOSOPHY 

waving stately evil of my trees, dead leaves and 
all, with the condemnation of those sun-shriveled 
neat neighbors of mine thrown in. 

All weeds are not vegetable; some are human. 
They nse ns, of course— yes, even more, they make 
use of ns, bnt how they blossom! A weedless 
world would be unnatural. If I may but serve 
as a prop for some morning-glory weed of a 
human, who greets the dawn with a smile, and 
defies heaven's blue with its esthetic tints, I may 
consider that I have a calling and election worthy 
of a prop at least. 



WASTE PLACES. 

Haw would it be, I wonder, if the " civil author- 
ities' ' the country over should take it into their 
heads to seek out the vilest, most disreputable 
places and transform them into veritable heavens. 
How again if every householder should find the 
plague spot in his house or yard and make it a 
thing of beauty. "The desert were a paradise 
if— -the rose might blossom there.' ' The human 
race inclines greatly to improve the improved and 
to make more vile the thing already smirched. 
Like the kitchen-middens of prehistoric ages, a 
modern dumping pile is cumulative, an ash heap 
heterogeneous, and an alley promiscuous, all inten- 
sifying their characteristics with the passage of 
time. 

Reformers there are and always have been, 
overthrowing kings, unseating senators, reorgan- 
izing communities, and improving religion, but 
where is he whoi is destined to dethrone the mag- 
nate squalor, and denude him of his rags. Suppose 
a people, say those of the United States, rose sim- 
ultaneously with this idea, let us see how it would 
work. The "authorities" of each, finding their 
damnation spot some pest-breeding, germ-develop- 
ing, bad-smelling locality, would proceed to turn 



82 STEAIGHT GOODS IN PHILOSOPHY 

it into a miniature paradise, its very rottenness 
aiding them in the attempt, a kiosk or a classic 
structure (a place for lilies and roses). While 
the typical city is astonishing itself, the country 
also is repairing its apparently irreparable spots 
in its highways. Its most dilapidated bridge is 
exchanged for something ornate, and its pregnant 
beauties suffered to be born. Simultaneously with 
this good work the typical householder discovers 
that while his front yard boasts of a stereotyped 
beauty like that of his neighbor, having* the trim- 
med lawn, the trimmed hedges and the trimmed 
trees, his can-adorned backyard is potential with 
an original beauty about which his neighbor has 
no concern. Why not make a mound of the old 
rags, old bottles and old shoes, cover it with dirt 
and plant vines there, sowing it thick with seeds ! 
Why not, in this rubbish- strewn back yard, so mix 
its practical aspect with its natural intent that 
green beauty and floral voluptuousness shall inter- 
twine and "straggle and draggle' ' their unified 
charm about in such free abandon that the house- 
holder shall find himself eating, smoking and 
reading there at all hours, lured more and more 
by its consummate fascination. Now, suppose 
that the well enough, the commonplace decencies 
that are neither beautiful nor ugly be let severely 
alone, and only the real vileness of the city, coun- 
try and household be simultaneously attacked, 
what would be the result after the passage of a 
few months ? 

Not a house in the land would have a closet con- 
taining a hidden corruption compared with which 



WASTE PLACES , 83 

the traditional skeleton is white and clean, not a 
city with a sink of material iniquity, not an in- 
habited country spot made dangerous by unright- 
eous neglect. Suppose that the general uprising 
causing an almost fanatic attack on these physical 
evils should be accompanied by an equally insane 
desire for light, so that the darkest and most loath- 
some places should become as day, what then? 
Blind alleys would be illuminated from end to end, 
villainous resorts would glare with electric eyes, 
treacherous pitfalls would yawn beneath arc 
lamps, every cellar and every closet in every house 
would have a possibility of sudden illumination. 

Who can deny that if such a peculiar idea were 
to suddenly strike the united population of some 
favored land, say, for instance, America, that the 
renovating instinct of making the last first, and 
the worst best, in the material sense, might not 
revolutionize the very race mind where the idea 
originated, inciting humanity to seek out its un- 
seen waste places, its interior loathsomeness of 
which the extreme is symbolic, determining to 
transform its 1 most hideous propensities into ten- 
dencies toward beauty supreme. This indeed 
would not alone be a transformation of locality, 
but one of energy also, turning hell into heaven, 
death to life. 



THE WILD BEAST. 

He climbs the highlands of old Turkestan, 

And mid its ramparts dares the world and man; 

Where trailing cedars and dwarfed willows 

thrive- 
Cold, shivering, hunted, he is yet alive. 
Along the Hindoo Koosh he stalks and glides, 
And beings human, by his stealth, derides. 
He sniffs the salt air blown cross Persian skies, 
And laps the water where the rivers rise. 
Where roll and rumble the Blue Nile and White 
He wanders boldly through the day and night, 
And on the edge of Africa he stares 
Back at the land where Freedom lives and dares. 

O blessedness of clean Sahara air! 

O purity of river springs and height! 
Great wonder of the land of larches, where 

The juniper and cedar seek the light; 
Hot beauty of the haunts of the gazelle! 

O'er Arab desert, where the antelope 
Has wandered far, and felt the fawning spell 

Of magic happiness and peace and hope; 
Even where the poppy, saffron, madder, thrive,— 

And almond trees sigh softly as they grow; 
The leopard and the lion, fierce, alive, 

Unrivaled, mid the sweating jungles go. 



THE WILD BEAST 85 

Alas wild beast! confined within his cage, 

For scent of free, wide air he'll long and fret. 
No man can break his will, nor quell his rag©, 

The pine and almond he remembers yet. 
The lichens, larches, cedars sadly call, 

And arctic splendors beckon him and gleam; 
The shining sands, grim heights — ah! all 

He lost in life, he lives again in dream. 

That the wild beast is not tame is evident, 
but— what is a wild beast, and what a tame one? 

A .wild beast is defined as having many charac- 
teristics; he is bold, brave, self-willed, and lives 
in "a state of nature"— whatever that may mean. 
If he is "Nature's own product," she is certainly 
responsible for him, and judging by the flashing 
eye, superb teeth and glossy coat of a wild beast, 
she seems to be a pretty good mother. If, how- 
ever, the wild beast is as self-willed as he is said 
to be, how does it happen that he is everlastingly 
tied to his mother Nature's apron strings? Pos- 
sibly Nature does the most for those of her crea- 
tures who * ' shift for themselves ; ' ' their very will- 
ful and free-lance tendencies making them true to 
her after all; for are not freedom, boldness and 
independence attributes of Nature's great soul? 
And are not tame beasts simply travesties on her 
ultimate self? This being so, she lets their teeth de- 
cay, their claws grow dull, their coats become 
rusty, their eyes dim; in fact, they are mangy — 
servile, and lean for support on their captors and 
subduers. Alas ! Nature repudiates them, and in 
"a state of culture"— spiritless, their glory de- 



86 STKAIGHT GOODS IN PHILOSOPHY 

parted, they degenerate into useful creatures, pets 
and slaves. 

I am not altogether defending the wild beast, 
or any living thing of earth, sea or air that is 
self-willed and independent. Self-will often runs 
into license, and that trait once manifested in any 
creature on the planet, he is set upon if possible 
and destroyed. But there is a self-will that is not 
license, and the majority of wild beasts possess it, 
with the exception, perhaps, of that wildest beast 
of all— man himself. 

Jungle animals hunt and kill for food, and fight 
for stalking ground; but it is not evident that 
the majority of them slaughter for the fun of it, 
or to tone up their nervous systems, strengthen 
their lungs with deep breathing, or purify their 
blood and clarify their brains. Necessity and the 
pangs of hunger drive them forth to prey upon 
their victims, but surely not the romantic love of 
adventure for adventure's sake, nor a desire to 
collect specimens as proof positive of their prow- 
ess and sterling worth. They demand the right 
to life and freedom. A very humble demand after 
all, and no greater than that made by man, who 
screams at the top of his voice, "Give me liberty 
or give me death!" 

Of course, in the estimation of the ordinary in- 
dividual, a beast or animal is not to be considered 
in the same category as man. The beast is in a 
class by himself, the machine class, or if not the 
machine class, in the created class, labeled and 
ticketed for a certain destiny which is that of 
slaving for humanity, or if not slaving, affording 



THE WILD BEAST 87 

mankind its chance of recreation in chase, capture 
and death, for the death's sake. God above— the 
loving Father— made these poor brutes, as a 
solace to man in his hours of ennui, a source of 
excitement and blood-letting pleasure. He, the 
loving Father, desired that man should feel the 
thrill of thrills, the ultimate supreme joy of hound- 
ing and stalking, and holding at bay some poor 
four-legged brute that had presumed to assert a 
little independence, and live in "a state of 
nature." 

I am not referring now to the right of mastery 
one creature has over another— man included— for 
an ultimate beneficial object, say that of self -pro- 
tection or preservation, but to 1 that assumption of 
right by which man preys upon other animals, 
possibly less beastly than himself, for sport. 

Now the climax of this sport is reached at the 
time the hunted creature is caught and the killing 
takes place. At this supreme moment the hunter's 
reward is at hand. He thrills with his sense of 
power; his heart beats a tattoo in his breast; his 
blood mounts to his brain. His victim, whose love 
of freedom is paramount though his body writhes, 
is the exhibition upon which he gloats like a glut- 
ton. It is a voluptuous sensation— nothing in the 
line of nerve thrill quite equals it— and he thanks 
and thanks again his "loving Father' ' for bestow- 
ing upon him this supreme opportunity and ca- 
pacity for revelling in this double extract of bliss. 
The "four-legged" brute had not sinned nor at- 
tacked him. He had been peaceably living his life, 
in his own free, independent way in a "state of 



88 STRAIGHT GOODS IN PHILOSOPHY 

nature". Perhaps I am wrong; possibly he had 
sinned. What more unforgivable than to dare to 
live thus? Only the hunter has the peremptory 
right of self-will; the hunted have but one object 
in being, and that object is to serve their captor 
and him only. 

The beast is not the brother of man— no, no; 
humanity never evolved from debased specimens— 
never. Any theory like that of evolution that 
implies such possibilities is preposterous. Man 
and man only has rights! And the wild beast is 
retreating farther and farther back into the wil- 
derness, where a human being can find no habitat. 
This intolerable, willful thing must be hunted out, 
killed, stuffed and set up in a museum. The 
naturalist needs him; the nature fakir must have 
him; schools and colleges cannot get on without 
him. Professors have a call to wrangle over him. 
He is altogether a necessity to modernism. Nim- 
rod, the mighty hunter, must "get busy." 

So) this wild splendor of a beast— the lion with 
a voice like thunder and a head like that of Olym- 
pian Zeus— eyes anxious and pathetic, staring 
over desert stretches for the sight of the enemy- 
ears listening for the report of the deadly rifle- 
nostrils moist and wide to catch the far scent of 
danger; this king of beasts, tawny like strained 
light— amber, golden, magnificent— stalking his 
own loved territory, guarding his mate and his 
cubs— is to die the death of shame, that man may 
taste a supreme sensation and gloat over a 
sanguineous bliss. Or if this king of wild beasts 
is taken alive, he serves as an object of curiosity 



THE WILD BEAST 89 

to crowds of sight-seers, who gaze amusedly at 
the caged creature walking back and forth behind 
the bars, restlessly doubling and turning himself 
or staring ahead as if seeing a mirage, dim and 
distant, of desert splendor and jungle beauty; his 
eye fixed on an apparent vacancy, which, to him, 
is filled with visions of other days when free, 
dominant, he guarded his prescribed domain and 
sneered at fate. 

But the lion is not the only wild beast. Up 
where the Ganges rises, the splendid tiger cools 
his bright red tongue; haunting difficult places, 
the crystal springs of sacred waters are offered 
him for drink. Where the larch, lichen, trailing 
cedars, birch, pine and juniper grow rank, the sly 
fox hunts for shelter and a right of being. In the 
high plateaus and inaccessible mountains, the 
wolf, deer and wild goat, seek safety and a home. 
The gazelle, too,— free, shy and beautiful, with 
eyes like those of a woman in love, hides in un- 
used places. The man-like chimpanzee and gorilla 
have taken up land far from human quarters; 
while the zebra, giraffe and elephant keep away 
from countries pre-empted by their enemies— man- 
kind. Even the small, dainty bits of "wild 
beasts" strive hard to find unassailable quarters 
and establish themselves for life. But, and but is 
sometimes a portentous word, the more difficult 
and inaccessible the stalking ground of the wild 
beast, the more anxious man becomes to drive him 
forth. No matter how safe he is from their 
attacks, they are never safe from his. He hunts 
the chamois for his skin, to be sure, also for sport 



90 STEAIGHT GOODS IN PHILOSOPHY 

—and to get a constitutional. He shoots the deer 
for the antlers that adorn, later on, his hunting 
box; and the lion for his hide, to spread beneath 
"my lady's feet." Man seems to be incessantly 
tortured by the idea that these creatures defy 
him, so he pleads excuse after excuse for ousting 
and destroying them. He needs the exercise; his 
liver is lazy; he must have the hide, the horns are 
absolutely essential; life would be inane were he 
deprived of these gifts and privileges which his 
"Loving Father" has so beneficently bestowed. 

So up where the lichen grows, on the great 
Siberian plain, he hurries armed and equipped. 
To the highlands of Turkestan and the Plateau 
of Thibet, he scrambles, panting, out of breath. 
To the desert of Iran he wends his way. To the 
source of the great rivers in the Himalayas he 
pushes. On the borders of Africa you see him, 
and in the Soudan, or penetrating Libya^ and 
sniffing hungrily the keen air of the Sahara. He 
is afraid of nothing when "his blood is up," and 
the hunter's moon rises like a shield of gold from 
the waste land of earth. He only is entitled to 
freedom. Wild beasts who have pre-empted far 
quarters he has no use for; and though they 
severely let him alone, they must, nevertheless, be 
routed out, tortured and killed, that his supremacy 
may be assured— and his health and liver pre- 
served. 

Great God in Heaven! where in destiny is that 
mirage of a millenium, promised by one of old, 
when the lion and the lamb shall lie down together 



THE WILD BEAST 91 

and cruelty and blood debauchery be consigned to 
perdition? 

Of course, there must be killing on this old 
earth of ours. The "fittest" is bound to survive; 
for self-preservation and self -protection all living 
things are destroying and eating one another. 
But if through cruel necessity that condition must 
be, why add to it willful slaughter for sport, and 
the love of slaying for the slaying's sake? 

I have heard that the sin of sins, the unforgiv- 
able transgression, is that against the Holy Ghost. 
"What comes nearer being that deadly sin than 
the rampant orgy experienced by the human soul 
when it revels in brute killing, for the thrills it 
brings? The sin of the sportsman is not visited 
upon the victim, for he can die but once, but upon 
his own soul, which it eats and cankers. He 
brutalizes himself and those divine powers given 
him for celestial enjoyment. His bliss in»his- act 
of killing is Mephistophelian. Yet should this ex- 
treme view of the question be presented to him, 
he would laugh, and declare that his premise for 
life is quite different, and therefore* he feels justi- 
fied in his attitude toward the brute creation; in 
fact, these wild beasts were bestowed upon him 
as a gift by his "Loving Father" to do with as 
he wills, and therefore he has no apology to make 
here or hereafter. 



MAN AND WOMAN, OK WOMAN AND 
MAN-WHICH? 

I can imagine a composite man, made up of the 
characteristics of the different males of various 
countries to date, laying down the law to a com- 
posite woman who stands beside him. "I am the 
one," he says; "you, woman, are but an adden- 
dum—an afterthought. God made me, or I 
evolved, it does not matter which, and you came 
later at my desire, as a solace for my hours of 
ease. You were given into my hands to do with as 
I see fit, exactly as were the birds of the air, the 
beasts of the field, and the fishes of the sea. Look 
at my brawn, my brain, my size— now what are 
you going to do about it?" And the "down-to- 
date" woman shrugs her shoulders and stares im- 
pudently into his eyes. "Never mind, ,, he goes 
on, "you can sneer and rail and scoff, but before 
you begin, let me call your attention to some in- 
controvertible facts. See those pyramids defying 
time, monsters on the edge of Libya,— I did that! 
See the Sphinx and the mighty pillars of Thebes 
and Baalbec,— I did that! See those miracles of 
architecture in India, and those exquisite temples 
of Cathay and Japan,— I did that! Look at those 
black tunnels under mountain chains, those for- 



MAN AND WOMAN 93 

tresses and castles; glance along the great wall 
of China,— I did that! Stare over the ocean and 
watch the craft as they come and go; the steam- 
ship, the white-winged sailboat. Gaze at the 
thousands of miles of steel rail, and the freight 
and palace cars, pulled by the iron horse, anni- 
hilating distance between seas— I did that! Be- 
hold the balloon and the airship mounting to the 
zenith; see the diving bell and the submarine boat 
descending to the depths— I did that! Notice 
carefully the lens of the telescope, how exquisite- 
ly it is ground, wooing the stars out of heaven by 
its clarity, fineness and power— I did that! Just 
examine this miscroscope, bringing new worlds to 
light and new possibilities 1 to the fore; consider 
the revelations of the X-ray and the N; glance at 
your telephone, please, and the wireless,— I did 
that! [Why, madam, the very garments you wear 
are the result of my effort, mine. Your furs, your 
shoes, your shoe-strings, those barbarisms on your 
headgear, are a gift from me. The gems on your 
fingers, the gold in your teeth, are due to my in- 
genuity,— I did all that! The house you live in, 
the bed you sleep on, the food you devour, the 
carriage you ride in— you have to thank me for- 
me! me! The really great pictures* that your eyes 
gloat upon, a large proportion of the literature 
you read, the music that charmsi you, are due to 
me." 

4 'But you swear, sir," interrupts the composite 
woman, shrugging her shoulders again; "you get 
drunk, sir, your mind is defiled, your thoughts are 
impure." 



94 STEAIGHT GOODS IN PHILOSOPHY 

" Drunk !" he sneers, "even you would indulge 
had you such a marvelous record over which to 
glory and boast. Now what have you to say about 
me— am I not master as well as man?" 

The woman stares long in his eyes without 
quailing; indeed, the expression in her own is 
sneering and defiant. 

"No one doubts that you manipulate matter 
very well," she answers, with a drawl that carries 
in it a deal of contempt. "Your mind even is 
quite godlike; but how about yourself as such? 
You are ugly, straight, flat— the beauty of curves 
is not yours. You grow a coarse beard on your 
face; you are far from neat; you smoke a vile 
cigar, expectorate tobacco juice, and say vulgar 
and impossible things; you boast and brag and 
preach, but fail to practice; you fight and knock 
your enemy down. Altogether as a person, apart 
from your achievements, you are mostly con- 
temptible. But look at me, how beautiful I am! 
Examine the texture and color of my skin; glance 
into my eyes and behold how my soul leaps 
through them; look at my rounded form, my deli- 
cate hands, tipped with rose-leaf nails; watch my 
dainty ways and note my disgust of filth and nasty 
speech. I am an interior being, the mother of 
you, the male. I do for you what no man can; 
I mould and form you for nine long months. My 
heart is all devotion. I am very, very pure, finer 
grained than you— a superior being! You can- 
not bring forth a child, how dare you, sir, present 
your mere mechanical contrivances and dead- 
weight monstrosities as in any way comparable 



MAN AND WOMAN 95 

with that which I can do in actually producing 
an organized person, which is yourself— you! 
Yes, I am the mother of man, and that man you. 
The cause is certainly equal to the effect." She 
towers over him and struts slightly. 

"Possibly," he answers, scowling. "You have 
materialized a Frankenstein in producing me. 
When you huddled my bones, muscles and skin 
together in a male form, how did you know but 
that this so-called masculine ' effect ' of yours 
might strangle and murder you? What is to 
hinder me from annihilating you altogether? You 
are utterly in my power and at my mercy. I can 
make of you a beast of burden less valued than 
my horse or ox, I can force you to perpetual 
motherhood or perpetual degradation, I can lock 
you up and condemn you to ignorance— I can even 
make you love me: and grovel at my feet ! ' ' 

She shrugs her shoulders again; the composite 
woman has acquired this habit. 

"True," she answers, "you can debase, de- 
bauch and imprison me, but should you wipe me 
off the face of the earth, you annihilate yourself 
also*. And as for love, I may simulate it in order 
to preserve my life, but the real thing you can 
never compel me to give. Cupid will have none 
of you, you beast ! Would you be loved you must 
give love in return; once feeling that emotion you 
cannot mistreat the object upon which you vent it. 
This question is self-settling, sir." She struts 
again, and defies him with her eyes. 

"Love is a mere side issue," he asserts, snap- 



96 STRAIGHT GOODS IN PHILOSOPHY 

pishly. ' i The grand passion is a disease ; man gets 
over it after a time— then what?" 

"You prove yourself a liar," she retorts; "for 
have you not called me ' the fairest, ' have you not 
said that to be with me was like dwelling in an 
orchard of spikenard and saffron, calamus and 
cinnamon, with all the trees of frankincense, 
myrrh and aloes? Have you not likened me to 
the 'lily among the thorns ?' Have you not told me 
that I am as 'a fountain of gardens, a well of 
living waters' ?" 

The tears begin to flow from her eyes, and she 
bows her head. Then the composite man, dumb- 
founded, looks about him for a place of egress. He 
can fight her to the point of hatred, but when she 
weeps, he is beside himself. Right here there 
appears a sage upon the scene. He is not a typ- 
ical "wise man," aged, bearded and on the verge 
of senility. On the contrary, he is erect and in 
his prime, with eyes quick-moving and temperate. 
His bearing expresses power without bombast- 
authority without assumption. He steps between 
this man and woman and looks them in the eyes. 

"Why such distress and misunderstanding?" 
he asks. "What is it all about?" 

"You are a philosopher," blurts the man; "you 
ought to know." 

"Sit down and let us discuss this matter," in- 
sists the sage. "You are both aggressive, and 
there is danger of a quarrel." 

"Yes, and of a divorce," remarks the composite 
woman. 

"Impossible," asserts the philosopher. "The 



MAN AND WOMAN 97 

negative and positive can never get rid of each, 
other; so! let me see if the harmony necessary to 
amicable relations between you two- can be dis- 
covered. For the sake of politeness and the priv- 
ileges supposed to be her due, I will begin with 
this woman's assumptions." 

"But I do not want any privileges, ' ' she asserts^ 
hotly; "justice is all I ask!" 

"Very well, then. First, you make claim to 
superior beauty. As a man thinketh, so is he, 
and I presume this rule applies to' woman also. 
Therefore, as you are quite assured that you are 
more beautiful than man, your certainty counts 
for something. Besides, man in his passion has 
filled your soul with this idea, using flattery as a 
means to obtain his desires, and you in your 
credulity believed him; indeed, for the time being 
he was honest, for while his passion lasted your 
fascinations were certainly genuine. Therefore, 
you have reason for your assumption of beauty. 
But, remember, it is the jack-o'-lantern of the 
mating season appearing and vanishing on the 
wings of sex emotion." 

"Next you assert your purity as evidence of 
your superiority over man. Now, my dear mother 
of man, remember that being a composite, you 
are made up of the traits of saint and sinner; in 
you are the fires of the courtesan and the religious 
devotee, the woman of the brothel and the nun of 
the cloister. Do not imagine that torpid physical 
conditions stand for innocence nor ignorance. 
Purity is fire blazing in high places ; purity is not 
atrophy; purity is temptation resisted, not the 



©8 STKAIGHT GOODS IN PHILOSOPHY 

lack of temptation. More negative than your 
enemy, the male, yon may or may not be more 
pure. So please lay no stress upon your superior- 
ity on that score. But your claim for a higher 
place in the universe than belongs to your oppo- 
site, is because you have given him birth 
after forming and nourishing him; and this 
assumption is certainly worth looking into. In 
fact, had you in reality created him, you might 
well rest on the apex of achievement. But there 
is nothing to prove in science, to date, that you 
did more in the nine months that you mothered 
him, than to help him clothe himself in a body of 
flesh. There is nothing to prove that he is not an 
eternal being making use of you temporarily as 
a means toward reincarnation. I do not assert 
that this is so; I simply challenge you to prove 
the contrary. One thing, however, you may be 
sure of— you can do something that he cannot; 
that is, mother the child within the zone of your 
own body." 

"Now let me look into his side of the question, 
and see if he can make his egoistic claims good. 
You Twentieth Century composite man! Point 
with just pride at your great achievements which 
certainly are gigantic, but I see no reason why 
they might not have been done by woman, minus 
the maternal capacity. Woman seems to be you 
with something added, namely, maternity, which 
addition amounts to a subtraction, as a certain 
proportion of her years and strength goes toward 
the exercise of this extra faculty. Now suppose 
the world of women ceased to exercise this latter 



MAN AND WOMAN 99 

prerogative, except in a certain number of selected 
cases set apart for the reproduction of the human 
race, and spent a century or more in developing 
brain and muscle equally with man. Is there any- 
thing to prove that she would fall behind him in 
the arts, sciences, or physical achievements? If 
history or legend have a base of truth, there have 
been times when women, the Amazons, for in- 
stance, were capable of herculean attainments; 
and the sporadic cases all through history show 
that she has possibilities in her of producing 
masterpieces under unusual conditions. The ex- 
ceptional women of all ages prove what the gen- 
eral level might be under favorable environment. 
So, my vain composite man, when crowing over 
your material achievements, remember that 
woman, taking advantage of the higher educa- 
tion, attending colleges and remaining unmarried 
until far advanced in youth, reduces her child- 
bearing period to fifteen or twenty years. This, 
with the fact that her knowledge of hygienics and 
physical culture, will probably greatly prolong 
her life, gives her in a period of, say eighty years, 
sixty or more for other work than that of pro- 
creation. Now there is no telling what splendid 
achievements she may be equal to in this half 
century or more, when her education shall have 
so advanced as to act as a stimulant to her crea- 
tive powers. The fainting, clinging, uneducated, 
much-married woman is out of fashion. The time 
she once spent in making a patch- work quilt is 
now devoted to study or athletics, and in a few 
decades a quite different feminine specimen will 



100 STRAIGHT GOODS IN PHILOSOPHY 

walk the earth from her who lives and moves 
today. 

"But, setting all this aside, from whatever 
standpoint you judge, remember that mathematic- 
ally speaking, woman plus maternity, minus the 
strength and time lost through it, equals you with 
your unadulterated aptitude for mechanical and 
intellectual achievement. Bemember, too, that 
your power over her body, enabling you to im- 
prison or debauch it, is fully balanced by her 
power over your very physical existence itself; 
or if not over your physical existence, at least 
over what sort of life and body you shall have. 

So you two* imperishable, opposite poles of the 
same thing— man and woman— standing for the 
negative and positive in being or the inner and 
outer, forget not that this is after all but a sex 
relationship, and that each of you beyond and 
above your gender is an individual, destined to 
manifest in a million forms during an eternity of 
being. Once believing this, for the sake of peace, 
I pray you, cease your boasting and your wrang- 
ling as to which is higher or lower or first or 
last ; and see that one of you is in no way superior 
as an entity to the other, and that in the long 
run and general round up you stand shoulder to 
shoulder, the brand burnt into you both being the 
mark human and therefore good!" 



CHEAP VERBIAGE. 

It is the easiest thing imaginable to call names; 
a street ruffian is quite equal to it, to say nothing 
of a child; therefore when a college professor 
pronounces women savages, and a minister of the 
gospel declares that men are beasts, the appella- 
tions pass for face value and nothing more. The 
word "fool" hissed at another may set the 
calumniator burning in everlasting fires, or pro- 
ducing but a flash go out like a firecracker. It is 
quite easy to say things, but often exceedingly 
difficult to verify them and stand by results. 
Even my so-called proofs may rest on a faulty 
premise, and therefore have no effect save that of 
kindling flames of indignation wherever the sparks 
of my ill-sorted words hit. Seeing but the outer 
appearance of Mr. Innocence, I may pronounce him 
a heartless iceberg; could I get into the recesses 
of his divine soul, I should possibly discover a 
seething volcano. It is rather daring to dabble 
in strong terms as regards the inaccessible. If I 
know a thing thoroughly I am justified in denoun- 
cing or applauding it in sharp language. I may 
pick it up with a pointed stick of a word and 
transfix it for the world to stare at, but before I 



102 STRAIGHT GOODS IN PHILOSOPHY 

presume on anything so radical I would better be 
sure of myself and the thing that I have in hand. 

'The cheapness of language and the richness of 
vocabulary impel the sage to be laconic. Pedantry 
he despises, sentimentality he avoids, bullet-words 
fired from the throat of a street Apache are to 
him a horror. So being entirely wise, he rarely 
calls names, and seldom uses reviling terms. Sel- 
dom, I say, for sometimes he makes exceptions 
and pronounces an anathema more terrible than 
the ecclesiastical curse, because in the heart of it 
sits truth, virgin and enshrined. 

Truth then is the only excuse for calling names 
—truth absolute and relative, truth unassailable 
and beyond question. It is easy to see how rarely a 
strong term can honestly be used, and why the 
wise of earth though speaking with authority 
avoid exaggeration. The chances are that strings 
of names applied indiscriminately to some object 
are like a glaring advertisement spread upon its 
windows as "a send-off" to the poster himself. 
He sees no other way of getting famous; or lack- 
ing mental fibre he perhaps attempts to "kill two 
birds with one stone,"— the winged abstraction 
and the soaring individual exalted by it. Inflated 
by egotism he thinks he has them down, but more 
likely he himself is prone and they untouched fly 
on. The man, whether a teacher or peacher, who 
calls such names as " ninny,' ' "beast," "savage," 
"consummate fool," etc. has some motive or other. 
Probably he seeks self-aggrandizement through a 
cheap method of advertising; if not that, he is 
likely after revenge, hoping to down his enemy 



CHEAP VERBIAGE 103 

with his slanderous tongue. Possibly he is justi- 
fied, and pronounces a maranatha that "rings 
true" and final. Whatever his reason, he is on 
fighting ground and can never stand against re- 
turn attack unless armed with good weapons and 
trained to the firing line. 



THE THOUGHTS THAT KILL. 

Thought is said to be dynamic, but what does 
the term dynamic mean? Does it pertain to 
mechanical forces not in equilibrium, or in equili- 
brium? According to the authorities, it always 
involves the consideration of force and therefore 
motion. It is a vague word, applied indiscrimi- 
nately to religion, philosophy and morals. The 
nearest we can come to accuracy in defining it is 
to call dynamics the mathematics of force and the 
science of motion. Now is thought dynamic, that 
is, can we call it an equilibrated or unequilibrated 
force? Does it move? Can it be reckoned with 
mathematically? If so, do we realize what a 
power thought is? Thought, mind you, is not 
speech, for the latter in expressing it is likely to 
weaken its projectile power. 

I want in this paper to consider thought as such, 
quite apart from its written or spoken symbolisms. 
The whole world is thinking and that means, if 
our hypothesis be correct, that thought has its 
element of force in motion; that a terrific impact 
of energy is bombarding us at all times, night and 
day, giving us shock upon shock, the source of 
which is beyond our ken. Put squarely, this is 
an awful assumption, and it is a wonder that we 



THE THOUGHTS THAT KILL 105 

can stand before it and persist in maintaining our 
individuality. The unseen world is a fearful bat- 
tle ground, where thought unshielded crashes 
upon thought,— force meeting force with diabolic 
persistence, idea embracing idea in the clutch of 
marriage or death, energies defying energies with 
devilish mathematical certainty, dynamics ruling 
fate and humbling individualism to its knees. I 
can think and so can you, and that is what is the 
matter. Animals, too, whether reasoners or not, 
can cogitate and mingle in this hideous contest 
indiscriminately. Thought is like lightning in the 
way it strikes. Whence it comes, whither it goes, 
how or whom it will hit, is beyond the common 
herd to ascertain, and our only defense is in strik- 
ing back with the same kind of projectile energy 
that has proved itself antagonistic. 

Before going further in this investigation I pro- 
pose to find a definition for thought and another 
for reason; peering at the same time into the ani- 
mal's mind to discover where to place him in this 
battle ground of dynamics. 

First, then, what is thought ? The act of think- 
ing might be simply defined as consciousness of 
certain phenomena belonging together, suggested 
primarily by the senses, but held intact inwardly 
till they develop into a motion true to itself 
throughout; one that can be revived at any time 
as a whole, standing apart, defiant of other 
motions. In thinking, we get a suggestion from 
outside, and about it we weave a series of judg- 
ments, comparing it with other notions hereto- 
fore conceived. In a sense, thought contains some 



106 STRAIGHT GOODS IN PHILOSOPHY 

small percentage of reasoning, though the reasoner 
himself may be quite unaware that his mind has a 
logical tendency. Thought involves within itself 
the elements of doubt, purpose and will. Thought 
lies within thought, that is, a simple notion may 
be reflected upon until it becomes more and more 
subtle and complex, far removed from the original 
concept, yielding in a sort of last analysis the 
very texture and mathematics of thinking itself. 
Now what is reason? Reason seems to be a 
form of reckoning or summing up of notions,— a 
finding of relationships between them; it amounts 
to an emphatic judgment, and results in decision 
or action. Thought pure and simple seems less 
purposeful, it is contemplative and meditative, 
but when it culminates in decision, it were better 
called reason, and is generally borne out by a line 
of conduct. Reason being a just relationship of 
facts, from the generalized point of view becomes 
a kind of universal intelligence, a recognized logic 
of events, and sequence of particulars bound to be, 
because of the law of relativity or cause and effect. 
From this definition of reason, animals are cer- 
tainly reasonable, though some enthusiasts on 
comparative animal psychology claim to the con- 
trary. What animals are or are not in the think- 
ing world depends upon how thought and reason 
are defined. Given a major premise in logic and 
the minor premise deduced is the reason— perhaps 
this explanation will decide whether the beast 
uses reason or not. How do we deduce a minor 
premise from a major except through inference 
based on experience? The first or major premise 



THE THOUGHTS THAT KILL 107 

is an accepted fact or axiom because of experience, 
and the minor has its normal relationship as a 
legitimate and reasonable successor. Do animals 
fail to recognize the universal truth of a major 
premise, whatever it may be, and find out by a 
series of experiments the validity of the minor? 
This is the question under fire today, and from 
its present state might be answered either way. 
Man, however, most assuredly reasons logically, 
by the nature of mind itself, and this reason 
which includes innumerable reasons, while it 
necessitates thought, can hardly be defined as 
such. All brainy creatures think more or less, 
that is, they are teeming with opinions, ideas and 
beliefs, and of course this thinking is reasonable 
or unreasonable, as the case may be based on, or 
devoid of facts. Thought can be listed and regis- 
tered—fact related logically to fact, or it may be 
a loose array of notions, ideas and dreams, backed 
by terrific energy that gives it dynamic potency 
without an element of sequence or truth to justify 
its being. Thought, then, unbalanced by the ele- 
ment of reason, and active with force, is dangerous, 
and more likely than not will maim or kill. Now 
in the finality we do not know what force is, nor 
the reason for thought and consciousness. Sec- 
ondarily, however, we understand the working of 
the laws by which consciousness and thought 
become possible, also the essentials that go to 
make up reason and all that pertains thereto. 
[We know that no thought can be without an 
expense of energy, and therefore the assumption 
is not preposterous when we infer that thought 



108 STEAIGHT GOODS IN PHILOSOPHY 

is dynamic. We know also that all thought takes 
form and symbolizes itself in some sort of figure, 
expressing itself internally in the same dimen- 
sions and outlines that exterior objects assume; 
therefore it is not too great an assumption to 
claim that thoughts are things. 

Presuming then that thoughts are dynamic, to 
an extent unreasonable, and also things, if our 
hypothesis be tenable, we can readily see what a 
terrible means of destruction they might become 
under favoring conditions. Bombarded by the 
thoughts of others we certainly are, though per- 
haps in a haphazard way; now imagine such a 
bombardment done with deliberate intention by 
some individual who has a special object to gain. 
Sent directly to its mark, the unconscious recipient 
of this fusilade or dynamic discharge that is 
freighted with suggestions diabolic and damning, 
must in course of time succumb to the malignant 
attack. Unless put upon the defensive he will be 
as literally murdered by outer suggestions as 
though he were battered down with a ram. 

All this seems quite possible if thoughts are 
dynamic things projected by will at an unpro- 
tected object. What is to be done about it, you 
ask, if such an assumption is proven to be fact? 
As fire is the remedy for fire, so thought must 
fight thought, or rather negative it. Suppose I 
send thoughts malignant with hatred, like whiz- 
zing bullets straight at a man's soul, and sup- 
pose, too, that they glance off that soul and have 
no effect— why? Simply because he has shielded 
himself with "dynamic things" of his own. The 



THE THOUGHTS THAT KILL 109 

mathematics of energy has been reckoned on in 
his case; forms of his own conception are giants 
that stand guard, panoplied and immune. His 
"thought forms" are resistive Titans, and from 
their gleaming shields the darts of the enemy fall 
harmless. Even a rushing onslaught of those evil 
demons, themselves fighting tooth and nail with 
his own strong phalanx, are unable to throw it 
down. 

Man then can "think off" the thoughts of others 
and stand comparatively aloof, or unguarded he 
may become a clear-cut target for intentional or 
unintentional attacks. He lives in a veritable 
chaos of thought forms, dynamic and mathemat- 
ically forceful, nevertheless is safe and protected 
by a reasoning power of his own without which 
he would be thrown down and destroyed. What 
then are the thoughts that kill another who sets 
up no defense and is utterly unprepared for 
attack? 

Suppose, for instance, that I deliberately direct 
my thinking powers toward the belittling and 
disgrace of an apparent friend. I depreciate him 
mentally, night and day; I think of him as degen- 
erate, small, mean; I condemn him constantly and 
despise him without mercy— subtly, silently, I 
bombard him with ideas of contempt, never for 
an instant qualifying my condemnations with a 
grain of charity. In time somehow, without 
knowing why, he will begin to lose his self-respect, 
to see himself with my eyes, to judge himself with 
my mind. Feeling himself contemptible, he will 
begin to act the part, and his downward course 



110 STKAIGHT GOODS IN PHILOSOPHY 

once begun, lie will lose no time in striking bot- 
tom,— a victim of my murderous energy directed 
with forethought at the very foundation of his 
honor and uprightness; worse, I remain unhung, 
unpunished, as far as the world goes, while he is 
denied a burying spot in a decent graveyard, or a 
single excuse for his degenerate conduct. 

The deadly danger of my act lies in its secrecy. 
I deliberately set about to exert my power, hold- 
ing my tongue speechless, that the potency of my 
devilish spell may be more pronounced. I am not 
the slanderer nor backbiter, nor the gossip, not 
at all; on the contrary, I preserve a "golden si- 
lence," and utterly mislead my companions as to 
the quiet diabolism of my deed. Of course, there 
will be a round-up and I shall get my deserts and 
the brand of my kind stamped in, but in the mean- 
time I go about my daily tasks a smiling good 
fellow, approved of and applauded by the world 
at large. 

Murderers are more common than we think, and 
the slain by unknown causes that mystify the 
coroner are being shoveled under ground every 
day of our lives. 



FOOD. 

Alcohol is not food; alcohol is a stimulant. Food 
is a builder, and in process of combustion adds 
something besides a temporary exhilaration to 
the blood. Food contains within itself the neces- 
sary elements for the reconstruction of the body. 
Alcohol, on the contrary, is destructive, and by 
its over excitation of the cells and organs pro- 
duces reactions that are distinctly injurious. All 
stimulants deal more or less in this way, but alco- 
hol in any form is the king of destroyers. He 
who cheats himself with the idea that alcohol is 
an emergency-aid to digestion, a food by proxy, 
so to speak, is entertaining a fiend in the mask 
of a priest. Alcohol comes graciously into the 
system, soothing or exhilarating it as the case 
may be, and he who imbibes it feels, for the time 
being, as though a hooded monk were blessing 
him with the sacrament. All sweet and good 
things uplift themselves in his mind; he loves his 
friends more tenderly, he thinks more clearly, his 
heart and mind go out to every living thing in 
sympathy; his ambition swells to bursting, he 
longs for world upon world to conquer— even the 
stars;— the Priest of all good is showering bless- 
ings on his head. Ah ! suddenly, without warning, 



112 STKAIGHT GOODS IN PHILOSOPHY 

the aspect of this Bonze, called of God, becomes 
malignant and the victim of his machinations 
finds himself slightly incoherent in his thought. 
His ideas, so clear a moment before, fail to co-or- 
dinate; the love so welling and deep an instant 
ago turns to jealousy and suspicion. What has 
happened to him? He has been tippling, that is 
all. Tired with work he slipped off into the coun- 
try or up to the mountain top, and drank a few 
glasses of beer "in order to build himself up," 
tone his nerves and make him "good and ready" 
for another battle with life. He imagines his food 
will assimilate better if he adds alcohol to the 
combination; in. fact, he imagines all sorts of 
things just because he wants to find an excuse 
for indulging a bad habit. 

Now food pure and simple is stimulating also, 
but it is the natural exultant uplift of a real 
climb, there is nothing fictitious about the rise. 
On a well-digested, assimilated meal, a man does 
not mentally ascend to the heights of heart and 
intellect in a balloon that bursts in mid-air and 
drops him ignominiously to earth. The stimula- 
tion of food is normal; in fact, the pleasure result- 
ant is an index of work well done. A true addi- 
tion has been made in the bank of man's physical 
being; there is something to show for it. The 
figures in his book of accounts stand for substan- 
tial. He commands something better than credit ; 
he has product instead. 

Now there are stimulants so mildly gentle in 
their reactions that their effect is practically 
harmless and the pleasure they give justifies their 



FOOD 113 

moderate use. But once and for all, let me say 
to you that alcohol is not one of them. * 'Danger! 
poison !" should be written on every bottle. 
" Handle with care" is not sufficient. Only a 
physician in case of great emergency is able to 
do even that. 

How beautifully alcohol flashes in the light! 
Amber, old rose, silver, all the gems sparkling in 
liquid splendor in its drops. The sun turns them 
to diamonds, the moon to opals. Alas, it is enti- 
cing,— like a courtesan! To mingle in it, to be one 
with it, is what you crave and anticipate. It has 
excited your appetite — and so does food, you say. 
Yes, but with a difference. Unless you are fam- 
ished, starving, your normal hunger is a sane, 
reasonable desire to put something adaptable into 
your body in the place of that used up. It is a 
simple restoration accompanied by a temperate 
craving. But when the longing seizes you for 
stimulant, it is apt to become frantic. If you 
cannot satisfy it openly, you will take devious 
ways to gratify it. It is the lust of the palate, 
the throat, the stomach, the whole being. Food 
soon satisfies a healthy appetite, but the craving 
for alcohol is insatiable. As a rule, the more you 
have, the more you want, and although you pam- 
per and indulge this longing, like an evil woman, 
it "turns and rends you". 

I have thus far been speaking of food as such 
in a generalized sense, and by using the word 
food I have absolutely covered the question. For 
food is food, that is, a body builder, and anything 
that fails to do this, be it bread, meat, vegetable 



114 STEAIGHT GOODS IN PHILOSOPHY 

or fruit, is not food at all. I may eat a hearty 
meal of wholesome material, and it may make 
me desperately sick; it was not food for me. 
Food comprises two factors, the substance and 
the recipient. Two essentials are necessary that 
food may deserve its appellation, namely, raw 
material and a good digestive organism. You 
may haul lumber to a vacant lot, but if the master 
carpenter and his assistants are not on hand the 
structure will fail to rise. So grain, meat, vege- 
tables and fruit become food at just that point 
where they are assimilated and turned into build- 
ing material for body. "What is one man's 
meat is another man's poison," is true of food, 
but not of such a commodity as alcohol. It has 
essentially, as far as body is concerned, one ele- 
ment, namely, that of rabid stimulation, and is 
without exception every man's poison. True, this 
power of quick stimulation may under dire ex- 
tremity act as a rebuff to death, warding it off till 
other factors can get to work; but outside this 
possibility it has no excuse for being, either in 
medicine or the pleasurable physical life of man. 
Extreme cases, such as a terrible accident, or 
absolute heart failure, are like those others where 
ether and chloroform are indispensable in hos- 
pital operations; they are exceedingly rare, and 
do not come under the head of our ordinary ex- 
periences in life. 

There are food cranks who lay down explicit 
rules as to what a man shall or shall not eat. 
There are others again who preach hygienic con- 
ditions of body and let the food question take its 



FOOD 115 

own gait. Of course, there are well-known food- 
stuffs, without which man could not subsist, and 
he in his enthusiasm for them forgets that with- 
out a good stomach they are practically useless. 
An individual writes books and books on the 
value of wheat, and another publishes pamphlets 
on how to develop and maintain class A digestive 
organs. I am quite certain that he who has ac- 
quired the latter will take no issue with the author 
on the food values in wheat. 

Food, as I said before, is only such under con- 
ditions, namely, a good builder and something to 
build with. Now a person might as well put 
rocks into his stomach as grain, if it is cancerous 
or burning with inflammation. Whatever is there 
will "lie like a stone"— even wheat. 

Fasting has been and still is, among religious 
bodies, a great remedy, where the man is incapa- 
ble of making food for himself. If he would go 
off when he is "run down" to some high moun- 
tain or near the sea, or onto the great plain, and 
instead of slyly or perhaps conscientiously taking 
stimulant, fast, he would be astonished at the 
result. This fasting need never be absurdly done, 
he simply reduces his food substance to minimum, 
giving the overstocked body, loaded with mate- 
rial not food, a chance to free itself. 

Food is a valuable commodity. Much that is 
taken in at the mouth is incapable of being made, 
through the chemical processes going on in the 
digestive organs, into food at all. Once in a man 
it proceeds to clog and incapacitate him, and fast- 
ing is his best method of getting rid of it. Jesus 



116 STEAIGHT GOODS IN PHILOSOPHY 

came "eating and drinking"; he also came "fast- 
ing and praying." The whole food secret lies in 
the assimilation of the products used for the sup- 
port of life, and the demon to be conquered every 
time is that one called "over supply," which is 
greater than the demand. The palate is a mis- 
chievous thing. Its primal object no doubt was 
to seduce men into eating, but its seductiveness 
overreached itself and set the human being to 
gorging and imbibing. 

I began this paper with a reference to alcohol 
as not food, believing that by showing the eccen- 
tricities of the abnormal the normal might appear 
more distinctly, also to flatly contradict a number 
of savants who claim that alcohol is food. All 
that I ask, in order to controvert their position, 
is a thorough investigation of facts as to the 
action of alcohol and its destructive quality. Let 
biology, physiology, pathology, make some 
strictly honest experiments and gather in data 
unbiased as to their desires on the subject, and 
I have no fear but my position will stand. 

There are other non-food stimulants used quite 
largely, but as alcohol is consumed inordinately 
in comparison with them, I use that as my lead- 
ing example. Eemembering that products are 
not food until they are accepted and chemicalized 
by the digestive organs, we shall be astonished 
at the different substances men devour, accord- 
ing to the locality and climate where they live. 
The blubber of whale, that would make a person 
of the temperate zone deathly sick, is quite the 
real food for the Esquimaux. Curry and rice suit 



FOOD 117 

the East Indian, and maize the New Englander. 
Rats, bugs and snakes nourish certain human 
beings as surely as ice cream " tones up" a chorus 
girl. Climate and locality are tremendous factors 
in the question of food. So also is social inter- 
course. A dinner eaten alone may go undigested 
and undeveloped into nourishment; in company, 
however, the same "food-stuff" may build a man 
up and give him a day's outing. Certain states 
of mind, when eating, help a person wonderfully 
in the process of digestion. Certain other states 
retard that process and turn his "meal" into 
poison. It is evident, then, that to be a food- 
maker one should discover in what mood he best 
digests his ' ' good square meal. ' ' This is as vitally 
important a problem as that about the substance 
out of which that same square meal is composed. 
There is no doubt that certain longings for 
special things have meaning and are indicators 
of what is really good for a human being to eat 
and drink. These longings can be easily dis- 
tinguished from the cravings arising from a fixed 
bad habit. The normal desire for the right thing 
out of which to make food does not stay with one, 
as a rule, after the craving has been gratified. 
One gets enough shortly of that which he wants, 
the chemical demand has been satisfied and the 
desire leaves him. I am not speaking now of the 
lust of the palate, but a cry of the whole body, 
for some special thing, like acid, water, salt, sugar. 
If people would watch the inner workings of their 
physical being more scientifically, they would 
shortly learn its language and be able to make 



118 STKAIGHT GOODS IN PHILOSOPHY 

good food for themselves out of the products in 
hand. In manufacturing food they incidentally 
develop rich blood, which, rushing through the 
veins and arteries, distributes the products and 
clears up the by-products all along the line. 

In closing I wish again to emphasize the truth 
that alcohol and other stimulants pure and simple 
are not food, but that this all important substance 
is a subtly made product developed in the human 
body from whatever it can assimilate and use. 
There is no use in laying down fixed rules as to 
what a man shall eat. But that same man, never- 
theless, should find out for himself by watching 
his own powers in digestion, not with the naked 
eye, by the cruel method of animal vivisection, 
but by logical conclusions drawn from his own 
conscious experience as* to how successfully or 
otherwise the manufacturer within him is work- 
ing out the problem. Is the skin of a man clear, 
are his eyes bright, is he hungry normally and 
periodically? Does he forget his meal after he 
has eaten it? Are the economics of his system 
up to par? Do the supply and demand balance? 
Does he hold his weight, is he strong, fully alive 
and ready to batt-le with difficulty? Is the sense 
of humor tingling within him— does he love to 
play, does he love to work? Is he defiant of 
death? Does he believe himself immortal, is he 
"dead 1 sure" of heaven and doubtful about hell? 
Are angels quite possible and devils a toper's 
dream? Then "for certain" he is a food maker, 
and consequently a being of power. 



THE VALUE OF THE IMAGINATION 
IN LIFE. 

The 1 image is not the ultimate or primal energy 
which expresses through it. Symbols in the mind 
are apparently the means by which this same 
energy becomes self-conscious. Furthermore, 
these inner forms, ranging from pictures to let- 
ters and letters to words and figures, are invari- 
ably patterned on an outside standard or objects 
discovered by the physical senses. What then is 
imagination? Imagination is the inner visualiz- 
ing, symbolizing power absolutely coexistent with 
thought and feeling in the self-conscious mind. 
A man could not think coherently for an instant 
without this faculty of forming his thought. He 
may possibly be aware of uplifting or depressing 
moods, attractions and repulsions, without word- 
ing or imagining them except in a vague way; 
but true thinking necessitates words or pictures 
in which to clothe it, and this is supplied by the 
imagination. 

You can see at once then of what value the 
imagination is in life, and how impossible it 
would be to get on with ourselves and our fellows 
without it. Form is one of the first factors in 
thought and comprehension; specialization into 



120 STEAIGHT GOODS IN PHILOSOPHY 

things necessitates form and consequently the 
variety which makes an individual life a possi- 
bility. 

There is no absolute uniformity anywhere; no 
two forms are exactly alike; their chief bond of 
relationship lies in the fact of form itself, as dis- 
tinguished from the formless. Law, for instance, 
is formless, yet would be a void or nothing with- 
out form. There is an inherent principle of form 
itself which is the one and only unifying tie that 
unites the multiplicity of diversified forms. Any 
person or animal that thinks at all has a dim or 
distinct recognition of this principle of individ- 
uality and form. Now the difference between liv- 
ing creatures in regard to* this inner visualizing, 
form-making power, lies in its clear-cut intensity. 
An artist with transcendent power will remember 
with almost mathematical accuracy the shapes of 
animals, birds, people and types, though the ex- 
terior model be absent. Once having seen some 
special form that really attracted his undivided 
attention, he carries the true outline of it in his 
brain and can reproduce it with brush or pencil at 
will. Another person without this perfect visual- 
izing faculty will have but a vague recollection of 
the accurate shape and postures of, say a cat, dog 
or horse, and needs must have the living, breath- 
ing model before his physical eyes in order to 
make a picture of it. Why? Because, as I said 
before, our inner shapes are stolen from outside, 
and he that can best concentrate on "outsideness" 
is the one who carries the accurate image within; 
that is, he can visualize and his dreams are peo- 



VALUE OF THE IMAGINATION IN LIFE 121 

pled with such vitalized realities that they become 
when his eyes are shut a horror or a joy. 

In the power to concentrate lies the open secret 
of what men call a wonderful imagination. I will 
not say that memory is another factor, because 
the power to concentrate includes the power to 
remember. Concentration is the open secret of 
good memory also. By concentration I mean 
using energy toward obtaining an outer picture 
to hang on the inner wall of mind. I get it any- 
how "by hook or crook"; I will have it; if not 
honestly, then dishonestly; if not honorably from 
conventional standpoint, then dishonorably. It 
is mine because I have set my heart upon it ; that 
is, I am emotionally bewitched after it— passion- 
ately craving it. I bore it with eyes; I pierce 
through and through it ; I feel it with the tentacles 
of my brain; I hear it with my inner ears, and 
catch its rankness or its perfume. I am enrap- 
tured, enamored and horribly in love with it; my 
full being is reaching out toward it, my utter soul 
is fixed upon it. This is concentration— imagina- 
tion. How many of us I wonder are equal to such 
frenzy? Yet without this intense emotion of con- 
centration, this passionate clutching and mental 
grappling with the thing desired, we are not art- 
ists and in ordinary parlance have no imagina- 
tion. Perhaps I should qualify this. All living 
creatures have the image making power, but only 
a few possess a rich and powerful imagination. 

The law cannot be laid down too strenuously, 
that unless you can concentrate you cannot create 
for yourselves "mansions in Heaven." That 



122 STEAIGHT GOODS IN PHILOSOPHY 

inner world of yours will be peopled with ghosts 
rather than with vitalized, dominating beings. 

Imagination in life has its fixed values. First 
and, foremost, you have imagination or you could 
not go on as an individual. So primarily its use 
is to permit you the right of special entity, as so 
and so— cat, dog, horse, cow, man. You have 
parcelled yourself off, and if one person you are 
certainly not another. You have sufficient form- 
making power to distinguish thing from thing, 
and to deal with life in terms of specialization. 
Particulars have worth to you in proportion to 
the assets of your imagination. Therefore the 
first value placed upon the image-making power 
is the possibility through it of life itself. Right 
at this point a great gulf is fixed between the 
genius and the common man. By a genius I mean 
one who can concentrate persistently and there- 
fore visualize and, necessarily, remember; one that 
uses energy greedily, emotionally, intellectually, 
and brings the outside world inside his mentality, 
thrusting it forth again under the guise of revivi- 
fication and therefore creation. Between this gen- 
ius and the common unimaginative man, as I 
before said, is a great gulf fixed but certainly not 
one impassable. It is a daring, difficult thing to 
try to cross it, but if one can endure the nervous 
shock of depth and darkness, isolation and still- 
ness, almost utter blankness, he may get over. 
The outside is not easily stolen and transferred 
to the inside and retained there in clear-cut form. 
The brigand who dares the attempt is bound to 
risk something and pay an exorbitant figure in 



VALUE OF THE IMAGINATION IN LIFE 123 

the act of readjustment. Often his very sanity 
goes in with the bargain— his friends, his repu- 
tation, his conscience, his health. For a man to 
steal the face of a friend, loot vast stretches of 
landscape, capture the real water of a sea, the 
genuine blue of a sky, the actual atmosphere in 
toto, the innermost "feel" of things— this whole- 
sale, almost diabolic appropriation, this utter, 
divine greed, is well nigh ruinous to his mental 
balance. He pays an enormous price for para- 
dise—and sometimes he gets it. 

When as an artist you go after the soul of an 
object and ravish it and bring it home into' your 
brain, you take your chances. Possibly you have 
wedded Eve before the fall— possibly after. The 
serpent may have seduced her, and her progeny 
may be— "well, never mind!"— you, the genius, 
have played with fire, and possibly are burned. 

But it is characteristic of him whose imagina- 
tion is intensive and creative power virile, that 
with all its beauty, horror, delight and suffering, 
he prefers his live, energized world to the mere 
dead level mirage that constitutes the dream land 
of the ordinary individual. Yet the value of his 
imagination in life is somewhat the same after 
all as is that of the clod. 

As the commonest individual existence hinges 
on the image-making power, so the uncommon 
life of the great visualist depends on the fullness 
of this gift. He is rich, to be sure, but his coin 
is from the same mint as that of the poor. Added 
to this he has stocks and bonds, houses and lands, 
principalities, servants, slaves ; a harem of beauty, 



124 STBAIGHT GOODS IN PHILOSOPHY 

and alas, dungeons, sewers, underground pas- 
sages, debris, dirt, grime. Nevertheless, he is rich. 
Like old Stamboul, his minarets, domes and mos- 
ques tower over his squalid streets, and for every 
barking cur in the alleys of his mind the caique 
floats in and out on the Bosporus of his soul; 
for every leprous native of his squalid land of 
dreams a ship glides round the waters of a mys- 
tic Golden Horn. The word value as applied to 
his exuberant imagination might better be 
changed to values. He may be a "poor devil" 
of an artist, a down-at-the-heel dreamer, without 
a dime or a bank book, but he is a producer for 
all that. No imagination is truly such that fails 
to create, that is, gives forth again. That which 
was purloined sees daylight once more as a new 
thing, touched up by the thief with the divine 
afflatus of himself. 

There is no pronounced, unusual merit in a 
celibate or impotent imagination. A brain stuffed 
full with images that cannot get out is a crazy 
brain. The divine imagination ceases to be such 
without breathing room and co-ordination, and 
becomes instead a hell, alive with monstrous forms 
that in their struggle with each other melt to 
formlessness and resolve at last into blank vacuity 
before the horrified eyes of their creator. 

The real visualist, the true magician, is inevit- 
ably a creator. The only newness that he gives 
the world is the inevitable stamp of himself as 
himself on all that he brings forth. He has 
ravished the soul out of the object he abducted, 
and welded it onto his own in a passion of heat 



VALUE OF THE IMAGINATION IN LIFE 125 

that must of necessity bring forth results. These 
results burst the shell of his brain, stimulate his 
fingers, his eyes, his voice, and lo! the outer world 
realizes a new and wonderful thing,— a great pic- 
ture, a great poem, a great song. The equation is 
struck, the thief has squared accounts, the price 
has been paid. A Christ is born, a miracle is per- 
formed, and God is justified. 



ESSENTIALS OF A PHILOSOPHIC 
LIFE. 

First and foremost, reticency or a cautious 
tongue is essential in philosophy. The preachy, 
proselyting person is rarely the philosopher. The 
man with the "gift of talk," fond of poses, is 
seldom inherently a sage. A real philosopher 
often has disciples who are drawn to him by a 
certain mental gravitation. He is harboring a 
jewel, and the flash of it they are determined to 
set eyes on. Or perhaps he has secreted a key 
in some hidden pocket of himself which a sly 
thief is bound to pick. Possibly he has a solvent 
for life's woes, a balm for its wounds, and certain 
injured persons are determined to get the recipe. 
Maybe under the moon he gathers herbs and be- 
comes to the eyes of curiosity a medical Paracelsus 
in search of life's elixir. Anyhow there is some- 
thing concealed in the true philosopher that 
nevertheless reveals itself in a form of power 
which excites the emulation of those who hang 
upon his skirts. "He's got something," they 
say; "yes, he has truly got something." There 
is nothing quite so exasperating to another as the 
fellow who "has got something." What that 



ESSENTIALS OF A PHILOSOPHIC LIFE 127 

' ' something' ' is they have no idea, but it is " some- 
thing,' ' and they want "one just like it." 

When a man has really and truly "got some- 
thing' ' that others hound him for, he is probably 
a philosopher. Certainly he has one of the philo- 
sophic essentials, and that is reticence. Look back 
in history and you will find that the great teachers 
were often hermetic, giving out or withholding 
as judgment dictated. I do not imagine Socrates 
announced himself with bell-ringing, like a fruit 
peddler. In his rank earnestness he was often 
loquacious and a great talker, but that was be- 
cause he was in love with his subject and not with 
himself. The pretender to the throne of philo- 
sophy is most assuredly in love with himself. 
Kant rarely left Konigsberg, though his fame 
spread from the Baltic to the far West. Though 
self-assured and positive, he knew how to hold 
his tongue. Schopenhauer found life so "tick- 
lish" that he brooded over it like a hawk. Sar- 
castic as a parrot, he was nevertheless more like 
an owl, and when he fully committed himself he 
certainly had something to say. Spencer was a 
man of words and reiterations, but every sentence 
had intrinsic value, and his verbosity was a 
mighty wedge that split and disorganized old 
conditions. He was sufficiently reticent to* keep 
himself to himself and talk from principles and 
data rather than personalisms. Jesus was a very 
well of secrets, giving cautiously his great form- 
ulas, often veiling them in parable, using the fad 
of His time, the fable, as a shell for His kernel of 
truth. Gautama gave out to the ignorant class a 



128 STRAIGHT GOODS IN PHILOSOPHY 

Hinayana philosophy of many rules and mandates, 
holding in reserve the mighty "Mahayana" for 
him only who could understand. As with Jesus, 
so with the Buddha; the eyes and ears of their 
disciples made all the difference. 

Now let us see how a pretender in philosophy 
manages. The sun heralds himself with the vir- 
gin dawn, but the fakir carries before him a shield 
of blazing brass and announces his arrival with 
a "tom-tom." "I am coming, I have arrived," 
he says; "I'm as secret as the grave. I've got 
something, too. Pay me a dollar and it is yours." 
He is an auctioneer, and sells his mental wares 
to the highest bidder. Pretending to hermeticism 
he is open at all times to approach, and takes 
bribes brazenly; in fact, advertises for them right 
and left. ' ' The greatest on earth, ' ' he nevertheless 
has cheap days when he reduces his hundred-cent 
fee to twenty-five. Now you cannot bribe, brow- 
beat or bully a real philosopher, nor will he flat- 
ter you. His reticence is not obstinacy; it is duty. 
There are some things he has no business to tell; 
there are times when he cannot consistently speak; 
and when he holds his tongue, he holds it. 

Eeticence then is one of the essentials of a phil- 
osophic life. Why? Because the truth is a "two 
edged" weapon and a sage is not likely to play 
with it. Once I saw a Japanese Buddhist Bonze 
draw a short sword, with a keen blade, its whole 
length on his tongue, but before he performed this 
feat he was sure of his nerve. Jesus revealed His 
secrets to the nervy, the brainy, the well-balanced ; 
but to the world He spoke in parables. 



ESSENTIALS OF A PHILOSOPHIC LIFE 129 

Another essential of a philosophic life is con- 
sistency. First the truth promulgated and lived 
by, must be true to itself; next it must be borne 
out by practice. It is odd, to say the least, for a 
man to discourse in persuasive tones on the value 
of a self-contained spirit, and later swear at his 
wife. To preach healing and go home and be 
sick, to uphold chastity and marry into lewdness, 
to recommend fasting and gorge, to advocate 
temperance and drink alcoholized bitters, is rank 
inconsistency, and not the way of a philosopher. 
In fact, the sage seems rather worse than he really 
is; his badness is apt to be on the surface. He 
is often gruff, impolite, and unconventional, but 
within he is white, that is, striving with all his 
might to live up to his convictions. He is often 
like a street digger, rather slimy to the eye, but 
inside abnormally healthy and clean because of 
his honest activity. 

The philosopher has to fight his way, and often 
has a rough-house exterior, but his muscles are 
tough as pine knots and his heart as rhythmic as 
a Buddhist bell. 

That reminds me that another essential of the 
philosophic life is the big back brain and the 
power to fight. A philosopher never " takes 
water" nor shows a white flag. Obstinate? Yes, 
and no. Not contentious for the sake of it, but 
from inborn conviction. Of course, he is a peace- 
lover, but the price of peace is often a fray. He 
never goes round with "a chip on his shoulder' ' 
spoiling for battle; he is simply a defender and 
belongs to that order of chivalry that is up in 



130 STEAIGHT GOODS IN PHILOSOPHY 

arms for the honor of truth. Truth to him is a 
woman,— she, and he is her knight. His heart as 
well as his head is offered in her defense. 

This being so, courage is undoubtedly an essen- 
tial to the philosophic life. But is there no per- 
sonalism in it? you ask. Is the philosopher for- 
ever hustling for abstractions? Yes, there is per- 
sonalism. Even truth takes form in his eyes. 
Sometimes she is his beloved land, his people 
under the guise of the Goddess of Liberty, and the 
philosopher is a patriot. Sometimes she is a city, 
an Athens, and your philosopher serves Minerva 
on the Areopagus. Sometimes it is a sacred scroll, 
a parchment, written over with finalities, beyond 
dispute, exact formulas that there is no gainsay- 
ing; and your philosopher stands or falls in its 
defense. Sometimes it is progressive science— 
hard, cruel, true— and your philosopher squares 
his shoulders and marches by its side. Sometimes 
it is Law, unbending, rigid, and your philosopher 
sets his jaw and stands hard by. Sometimes it 
is Art, and your philosopher swerves not a hair's 
breadth from the task assigned. Sometimes it is 
the "poor and needy" and your philosopher be- 
comes as one of them with no place to lay his 
head. Personalism! Your philosopher is always 
a person, and deals with personifications from 
start to finish. 

Now I am about to say something startling. 
One of the supreme essentials of a philosophic life 
is emotion. A philosophic head without heart to 
balance is more dangerous to humanity than an 
aeroplane. It rides supremely over the woes of 



ESSENTIALS OF A PHILOSOPHIC LIFE 131 

others, indifferent for the time being to the clod 
and its miseries. To realize the mathematics of 
a problem, social or otherwise,— to get at the 
inherent rectitude snuggled like a kernel in the 
shell of the ten commandments, and not kindle to 
them emotionally, is monstrous. Energy has 
heat; without energy the inherency and initiative 
of a thing or principle is dead. No matter how 
prettily the social laws clear up in the mind of 
the thinker, proving their efficiency by the per- 
petual power of adjustments in combination, if 
this same thinker has no feeling, no love for the 
beauty of such possible poise and balance, he is 
not a philosopher, and lacks one of the essentials 
of a philosophic life. And this is a touchstone 
by which you can detect values and distinguish a 
fakir from a sage. A pretender may weep when 
he explains his philosophy, but more likely his 
tears are flowing because the cash box at the door 
of his lecture room is sparsely filled, than from 
emotion over the beauty of the so-called truth he 
expounds. He has strained his eyes so hard for 
a glitter of coin that, whether or no, they shed 
tears. " Jesus wept." There is no account or 
laconic statement that " Jesus smiled." And yet 
I presume He even laughed. Emotion consisting 
entirely of tears is nauseous. The sense of humor 
is an essential to the philosophic life. The sun 
is the real thing; shadows depend on the sun, but 
the sun is quite independent of the shadows. The 
weeping prerogative in humanity is the special- 
ist's own. Things, as things, stand up and hide 
the sun, and shadows lie prone at their feet. But 



132 STEAIGHT GOODS IN PHILOSOPHY 

humor is the very sun itself laughing among the 
branches and between the leaves of " things in 
themselves' ' so utterly independent of them that 
there is a universalism about it that is a dis- 
carnate joy. A puritan philosopher, with a Jap- 
anese sigh, a hollow cheek and prim lip— unless 
he laughs inside and makes a joke of his exterior— 
is after all but a pretender to the throne of the 
sage. He is simply "one long drawn shadow/' 
egotistic enough to imagine himself endowed with 
potency to put out the sun. Thank heaven that 
shades are not self-energizing, and that the humor- 
ous Sun uses them as foils, and foils only to his 
transcendent brightness. 

Another essential to a philosophic life is chas- 
tity, and any priest of any cult who secretly 
preaches free love, obscenity, or phallic worship 
as such under the guise of hygiene, sun baths, etc., 
has no possibility of living a philosophic life. The 
distribution of energy is at the base of the sex 
question, and that teacher who authorizes a waste 
of this precious commodity, or rather its misappli- 
cation, is not in the narrow, straight path of 
philosophy. 

Another essential to the philosophic life is self- 
sacrifice, or rather, self-preservation. The self 
given up is the self found; the self laid down is 
the self upraised. This is not sentimentality, it 
is the law of energy transformed. The self is 
many sided. The unit of self contains within it 
the many of selves. But who ever heard of a 
fakir giving up anything, even one of his many 
selves, to gain the supreme reward? The fakir 



ESSENTIALS OF A PHILOSOPHIC LIFE 133 

specializes on his ego — his ego. No other ego is 
taken into consideration except as coin is in its 
vicinity. The fakir is after money first and noto- 
riety second. He bleeds the poor, by promises 
of wealth. "Send me a dollar,' ' he says, "by 
next post, and I will show you how to make 
twenty.' ' And sometimes he does. The motive 
of this pretender to unheard of powers, however, 
is "get rich quick"— "hit or miss"— it doesn't 
matter. The object of the true philosopher is to 
prove the verities and practice on the principles; 
that is, really become what people think he is. 
When they say "he has got something," he wants 
to make good. 

But you ask, what's the use of it all? Doesn't 
the truly wise man pay too big a price for his 
wisdom? Does it really bring happiness? In 
answer, I would say that he pays well no doubt; 
he lays abnormal passion, greed, wicked selfish- 
ness, fear, an evil tongue, love of notoriety, on 
the altar of philosophy and sets fire to them. In 
return he gets courage, a certain lofty indifference 
to public opinion, some "dead sure" formulas 
to live by, and ultimately power. Now each in- 
dividual must decide for himself whether the 
flame is worth the candle, whether the fire of 
energy is a good exchange for the body of desire. 
No person is obliged to be a philosopher. There 
is no law that can whip him into line and force 
him to travel the narrow way of the sage. Truly 
wise men are not proselyters, taking a human 
being by the coat collar and yanking him into the 
fold. "Fishermen of men" perhaps they are, but 



134 STKAIGHT GOODS IN PHILOSOPHY 

there is so much good bait on their hook that it 
is harmless to him who bites. 

The essentials of a philosophic life are positive; 
in fact, in strict philosophy (unlike religion) there 
are no non-essentials. That which is not essen- 
tial is irrespective of philosophy. 



• 



CONSTELLATIONS. 

As constellations refer primarily to clusters of 
stars, used figuratively in regard to persons they 
should necessarily be brilliants with power to 
flash and scintillate. Groups of poets, scientists, 
artists, thinkers, might well make up a peopled 
constellation. Probably there would be a fiery 
sun, or several for that matter, dominating the 
lesser lights, even down to the little asteroids. 

Once belonging to a human constellation it is 
hard to break from it. The attractive power of 
the genius who heads it is as binding as gravita- 
tion. Were I advocating reincarnation, I should 
say that human constellations fall together in 
groups periodically from life to life. Were I 
teaching evolution I should say that certain 
evolved factors embodied in human bodies fall 
together by the law of affinity, occult chemistry 
supplying the motif to constellate. Were I preach- 
ing the ordinarily accepted tenet of creation, 
I should again posit mental sympathy through 
congruity of taste as a sufficient reason for the 
grouping of human stars. So it does not matter 
which premise I take as the cause of like seeking 
like and opposite attracting opposite, the fact 
stands however it is founded. 

People fall together in groups, brilliant people 



136 STEAIGHT GOODS IN PHILOSOPHY 

especially. Whether expert thieves or expert 
divines, infernal liars or dazzling saints, the fact 
that they can dazzle constellates them under the 
spell-binding gleam of their central sun. Lucifer 
was a star angel and he fell headlong through 
heaven, but continues to shine in hell, neverthe- 
less, the brilliant dazzler of a flashing group. 

The good or evil expressed through a constel- 
lation is generally indicated by its central sun. 
He may be an old red or yellow star burning with 
the fires of diabolism, but while he burns and has 
fuel he is bound to have a group of the lurid ones 
about him reflecting the lustful coloring of him- 
self. He may be a young blue sun tinted to match 
the heaven in which he lives, or white within and 
without like a diamond of first water, and other 
stars will cluster around him reflecting purity and 
clarity of his heavenly brightness. Whatever the 
constellation, whether evil or good, it is brilliant 
and true to itself and master. An all-pervading 
spirit feeds its fires, a unified motif strikes the 
match, aim and idea pour in the fuel. 

The eyes of the persons making up a special 
group flash with the same light; it may be lurid, 
it may be keen, it may be divine, but it is the 
unified gleam of the special constellation to which 
they belong. Imagine a group of Socialists, all 
stars, coming together because they must. In the 
eye of each, in the expression, is the identical 
menace that their leader wears. Eebellion gleams 
in the glances of a group of revolutionists, hate 
in those of the anarchists. All kickers who revolt 
at the present state of things have the fraternal- 



CONSTELLATIONS 137 

lodge glance that marks them members of this or 
that constellation. Artists, those who have fra- 
ternized under a master, have the long stare that 
pronounces them concentrators. You know their 
teacher by their glance, and the slight scowl be- 
tween their brows. Musicians carry about with 
them the very atmosphere of their special group. 
There is a "general some thing' ' that acts as an 
expose. Members of secret societies, presumed to 
be as hermetic as a sealed jar, are as easily seen 
through as is its glass. Their "air of secrecy" 
goes along with them and betrays the very lodge 
in which they affiliate. Eeligionists and philos- 
ophers have faulty backdoors to their "sanctum 
sanctorum"; they will not stay shut, and the flock 
of sheep that make up their special herd are 
known and ticketed. 

The shine in a constellation inevitably betrays 
it. If it were not by its very nature made up of 
a group of brilliants it might remain perpetually 
undiscovered. There are people working and 
fraternizing sub rosa in societies, but they are 
not in constellations. The law of affinity un- 
doubtedly applies to them also, but being irre- 
flective the world is but little wiser in regard to 
them. I have said that people who belong in this 
or that constellation cannot help themselves. Per- 
haps I should qualify this and say, certain per- 
sons being thus and so must of necessity find their 
own, that is, others of the same ilk. But why 
need persons be so and so, and so and so? Being 
a brilliant thief, I of necessity herd with thieves, 
but why be a thief at all? The first initiative in 



138 STEAIGHT GOODS IN PHILOSOPHY 

self is taken by self, through that same self's 
desire. Desiring to steal, I fall into a constella- 
tion of thieves; my mind and the other minds of 
the den run together in liquid brightness which is 
thievery. If I desire beauty I necessarily frater- 
nize with others of the stamp who revel in beauty 
also. My soul is forged with those others who 
melt as I do. This goes to show that I may pos- 
sibly free myself from a constellation, good or 
evil, by changing the initiative desire; but while 
I liberate my future life to some extent from the 
associations of the group, I cannot liberate the 
past nor get rid of the causes growing therefrom. 
If I have once truly been one with a constellation, 
a star cluster of brilliant people, good or evil, it 
is like tearing my heart out to divorce it, and 
only by change of desire through revolt of con- 
science can it be done. Where the conscience does 
not, can not revolt, the stars in the group being 
white through and through, nothing save a dia- 
bolically evil desire fostered on carrion and 
nursed on slime can cause a break. 

A pure order may have a viper in its midst, 
and should it escape from the cluster and shine 
in other centers, it will always have something of 
divinity about it to tell the world of its previous 
high estate. ' l Once a gentleman, always a gentle- 
man,' ' though dead drunk in the gutter. The 
stamp is on him and serves to make his fall a 
monstrosity. 

One may well ask here, if it is possible to shine 
alone, irrespective of constellations. Yes and no, 
and I will tell you why. In the first place that 



CONSTELLATIONS 139 

which makes a constellation is the law of attrac- 
tion or affinity. A constellation is not an organ- 
ized society necessarily; it may or may not be. 
Groups of men fall together in certain ages and 
places, but there is perhaps no chosen president, 
speaker or secretary in the combination. It is 
neither deliberately organized nor is it acci- 
dental. There is a deeper law beneath this prob- 
lem. When a Grant, a Sheridan, a Sherman and 
a Lincoln come forth at the same time and work 
in harmony to save a country, there is something 
farther down than the eye can reach as the gist 
of the puzzle. When a Longfellow, a Lowell, an 
Emerson, a Thoreau, an Alcott, a Holmes, a Parker 
and a Phillips appear contemporaneously and stir 
up the dry bones of crabbed New England, there is 
a meaning behind it that the ordinary mind does 
not catch. When a Shakespeare, a Ben Jonson, 
and others of the Elizabethan Age place bay 
leaves on their own heads, there is a question 
there that the common sense man has to ponder. 
When Eolean poets singing in group produce 
such music that the Lesbian coast is echoing it 
yet, the curious psychologist might as well sit 
up and look about. When inventors come con- 
temporaneously, and congenial thinkers like 
Spencer, Tyndall, Eomanes and Darwin appear in 
clusters, it becomes a puzzle worth considering. 
Environment surely has much to do with it, and 
the waiting ripeness of the age. The peole are 
ready and the masters appear. At another time 
and under different conditions these same mas- 
ters might be in hiding. 



140 STRAIGHT GOODS IN PHILOSOPHY 

The secret sides of a constellation are the bodies 
of its stars, but that which belongs to the world 
is the flash and shine of them. 

Now as to individual splendor— the isolated 
genius— he is there in his constellation as surely 
as some big sun dominates others in the sky above, 
and his isolation and selfhood lie not in lack of 
company, but rather in the aloofness that his 
greatness necessitates. He is alone in a crowd,— 
in the center among his own disciples or followers 
he is still, in one sense, by himself. In another, 
however, he is one with them; his motif is their 
motive, his aim theirs. As before said, the same 
light flashes in his eyes as illuminates theirs. 
The spirit of the body is one. 

Curious people will ask all sorts of questions 
as to the length of life of a constellation; if the 
head of it is a hypnotist, if he rules and sub- 
jugates by suggestion, if all his disciples are 
negated and mere puppets in his hands, if in- 
fluence is his sly weapon, and sophistry his van- 
tage point? To the "lump sum" of these ques- 
tions I answer no. Stars are individuals. He has 
a weak knowledge of the human will who claims 
that it can be permanently dominated by a mas- 
ter or a hypnotist. A so-called master could not 
for an instant claim the name if he attempted an 
unfair control. The master rests on principles, 
and principles are mightily impersonal as regards 
partiality, selectivity, domination. To be sure 
there is a law of selectivity, but the law per se is 
impartial. 

No, the members of a constellation, people 



CONSTELLATIONS 141 

entitled to flame and shine because of their vital 
energy— bad though they may be, or good— are 
not easily hypnotized in the revolting sense. The 
persons who make it up are too positive for nega- 
tion and submission to a tyrant head. Fight 
among themselves they may, but no one of a con- 
stellation makes a doormat of himself for others 
to walk over. 

As to the length of life of a constellation, the 
question is self-settling. If the theory of rein- 
carnation be proved to be a truth, a group of 
humans may appear and shine periodically, age 
after age. If one short life is all man has on 
earth, by the law of affinity groups and herds of 
congenial souls would get together just the same. 
Whether the time of a constellation is short or 
long does not prohibit its strength and adjustabil- 
ity. In fact, all things equal, it would probably 
remain intact indefinitely unless outside factors 
served to break it up. Inherently it is true to it- 
self, and therefore by its nature perpetual. Its 
breaking up even from the point of external ex- 
perience by death and disintegration is not in 
reality its destruction, for though the body van- 
ish, the individual spirits that animated it with 
one aim or motif are in some form of life contin- 
uing in close communion. 



WHY WOMEN ARE SLY. 

Women are subtle and sinuous in their ways 
and dealings. They rarely take the short cut and 
line of least resistance, but meander round instead. 
They feel their way like cats, treading gingerly, 
often retreating to return again with a slight 
change in their course. They act as though 
dreading explosions, gunpowder, dynamite. Their 
eyes, called modest, are really anxious, and the 
far-off look which poets rave over is the problem- 
glance; they are peering into a maze. They are 
made in curves, and they act in curves. The art 
of evading is the woman's art. They argue in 
circles, not because they fail to see straight ahead 
from cause to effect, but rather from caution and 
a dread of committing themselves. Even their 
frankness (and they are often frank) is condi- 
tioned by a great secrecy. The really loquacious, 
apparently blunt woman is a vast storehouse of 
unspoken things. "The other half has not been 
told." In unloading her mind she reserves some- 
thing. A woman without reserves is a woman 
lost. A woman who has given all is out of the 
market. A woman with no mystery in her make- 
up is unpainted, unpowdered, and altogether too 
transparent to be a woman at all. 



WHY WOMEN AKE SLY 143 

Why all this? Glance back into history and 
study human evolution by means of data. There 
was a time, it is said, when women were Amazons ; 
that is, strong and invincible; but that era, if it 
ever existed, was prehistoric. The legends that 
introduce us to these Dianas of mythical ages and 
peoples produce no data worth having. In his- 
toric times, beginning with Herodotus and our 
family Bible, we find out a great deal about the 
status of woman. Veiled— a vast majority of 
them— or kept indoors, behind shutters, they 
became female ' ' peeping Toms, ' ' having no recre- 
ation but gossip among themselves, and no occu- 
pation save that of vying with each other in child- 
bearing. In a sense they were on a level of the 
more prolific animals. Progeny quantitatively 
was the ideal they were forced to invoke. A bar- 
ren woman was a monstrosity. Probably in the 
beginnings of her evolution she quite agreed with 
man in this question; having no way of developing 
her brain, her energy went to sex and motherhood, 
and all the evil as well as the good that travels 
with it. She was keen in her own experiences, 
intuitive, jealous, revengeful, passionate, abnorm- 
ally affectionate, yet from love, of excitement and 
change, treacherous and fickle. Her energy flow- 
ing through so constricted a channel was danger- 
ous and explosive; her methods of gaining her 
ends, for the same reason, sly and sinuous. The 
fact that she could do something man could not, 
that is, bear offspring, gave her the peculiar ego- 
tism of motherhood from which she has not yet 
entirely freed herself. She makes capital out of 



144 STRAIGHT GOODS IN PHILOSOPHY 

the fact that she can produce progeny. She rises 
the birth pangs as a bribe with judges and jury. 
She manages her husband with the same seduc- 
tion. She throws glamour over her lover during 
the courting period with vague hints in regard 
to it. She glories in her natural martyrdom, and 
uses it for all it is worth. She tells her sons how 
she suffered in bearing them, and persuades them 
into the straight path on that account. She gives 
her daughters a formula by which they shall some- 
time persuade their sons also. 

Woman is really so shrewd that she seizes upon 
any and every resource that shall give her power. 
Poor as poverty compared with man in her "ways 
and means,' ' those few that she has are used for 
all they are worth. Her childbearing capacity is 
her richest asset. In every conceivable way she 
makes it tell. There is a certain amount of phys- 
ical suffering parceled out to her through the dis- 
pensation of the Almighty that man has not been 
afflicted with, and her nature is such that she un- 
doubtedly prefers it to the painless life of her 
husband. It is better capital and brings larger 
interest. Like a child, she trades her birth pangs 
for a diamond necklace or a house and lot. 

Now I am not speaking of the exceptional indi- 
viduals of the feminine sex, but of woman as such. 
Her weakness is her strength, and she knows it. 
She came into the world as a woman simultane- 
ously with man, no doubt, more powerful than he 
in fruitfulness and weaker than he in her capacity 
of self-maintenance. She squares up for her extra 
capacity with her extra agony, and faces man with 



WHY WOMEN ABE SLY 145 

her eyes on a level with his; but in order to main- 
tain that level and 'hold her place of equality, she 
has been obliged to use subterfuge. Her negative 
ways are sly ways; her ends are gained by round- 
about methods. 

Now of what nature is this man who faces her 
so levelly? Minus one power that is hers, namely, 
that of child-bearing, he nevertheless gains in 
physical freedom. All roads are open to him save 
one,— the road to the heaven of motherhood. But 
few ways have been open to her save the straight 
path to this peculiar paradise. In symbolism she 
might stand for Unity or singleness of aim,— the 
simple; while he would represent Complexity, or 
the compound,— many. I am refering now to wo- 
man as feminine and man as masculine. But as 
it happens, woman though such is also an indi- 
vidual, possessed of an unsexed element, which is 
strictly mind fired by ambition and curiosity; no 
female, even the most slavish, is entirely without. 
Many women are more intellectual than feminine, 
and that is why they are sly. Having other de- 
sires to gratify besides those of mere sex and 
motherhood, and formerly as a rule restricted in 
almost every conceivable way in so doing, they 
get gratification by stealth, and the i ' stolen kisses 
are sweet.' ' 

Man enjoys so thoroughly being pre-eminent, 
he has dinged into her ears from time immemorial 
that her sphere is the home. She has but one 
trade, that of housekeeping; one duty, that of wife 
and mother. To be sure this one trade of hers 
is a vitally complex affair. Inside this house 



146 STEAIGHT GOODS IN PHILOSOPHY 

where she is supposed to reign, she must in real- 
ity be ' ' Jack of all trades. ' ' No chef on a salary 
of ten thousand a year is supposed to equal her 
in cooking. "Home cooking'' is, should and 
must be the very acme of the cuisine art. Her 
husband's stomach is the most sacred thing on 
earth, his heart is a mere bagatelle in comparison. 
She is not only cook but housemaid, in theory if 
not in fact. Her hawkeye must be ever on the 
alert for dust and disorder; her keen nose must 
be equally alive to scents and counter scents; her 
artist temperament must continually adjust itself 
to! color and sound. Altogether, she is cook, 
housemaid, gown designer, artist, cordial hostess, 
bargainer, manager, economist— social, political 
and financial. At the same time a person well- 
read, up to date, perfectly robed, companionable 
and sympathetic with husband and children, and 
never on any account short tempered even to the 
lifting of an eyelash. Yet as before said, she is 
simply wife and mother according to the final 
mandate of the preacher and the ultimatum of the 
husband. I do not pity her in her complexity of 
home life, for to- tell the truth it saves her indi- 
viduality intact. To be simply wife and mother 
and nothing more, would be damning to any ele- 
ment of personality that might be hers. She 
would not deserve a name even, had she not dis- 
tinctive element to answer to it. Women might 
well be all Marys, or Myras or Janes had they not 
the inside house life to develop their individual 
differences. But the inherent complexity in wo- 
man is too big even for her home interior; she 



WHY WOMEN ARE SLY 147 

is morbidly anxious to get outside and live. She 
feels the call of the sea, the sky, the far spaces. 
The city lures and beckons— the trades, the shops. 
Even the rougher jobs entice and stimulate. She 
wants to fight, to write, to preach, to teach— to 
be a heroine, a missionary, a doctor, a lawyer. 
She simulates modesty and coquetry to wheedle 
men into letting her into their colleges and pro- 
fessions. She studies secretly and learns things 
she " ought not to know." She nurses her baby 
once too often each day, in order to steal the time 
to solve a problem in mathematics. Her curiosity 
isi fiercely abnormal along all lines that her hus- 
band follows; she wants to keep up with him, she 
will keep up with him, and if there is no open, 
above-board way to so do-, she chooses an under- 
ground method. This is why she is sly. 

In early history, devoted to motherhood, she 
still had enough other traits to cause her to be 
abnormally curious. Suppressed and enslaved 
she became both explosive and treacherous. Al- 
lowed more latitude today, she nevertheless 
brings into the present century her inherited at- 
tributes and continues to use influence to accom- 
plish her ends. Now what is the meaning of the 
word "sly"? In its extreme sense it is "meanly 
artful;" in a modified sense it is "cunning, in- 
genious and shrewd." Woman as a rule is not 
meanly sly, so we ignore the first definition and 
cling to the second. Her slyness, shrewdness or 
artfulness, if it be a fault, is really not hers alone. 
By the nature of the life she has been forced to 
endure through the centuries she could not very 



148 STRAIGHT GOODS IN PHILOSOPHY 

well be otherwise and have a life worth living. 
Who then is to blame? It is partly the fault of 
the male, her companion, and partly the result of 
her necessary motherhood. Man, aggressive, com- 
pelling, selfishly in love with freedom and all that 
pertains thereto — a monopolizer by his very na- 
ture—has by every possible means in his power, 
through preaching, teaching, appealing to her su- 
perstition, coercing, bribing and dictating, striven 
to tie woman down to the life of homekeeper, 
wife and mother, and that only. Ministers and 
priests are forever exhorting her to use influence, 
influence. Her whole stock in trade, they tell her, 
is influence. Would a woman have anything de- 
sirable let her marshal all her little cupids of in- 
fluence and get it. Does she want a Eepublican 
or Democratic President to rule over her country, 
let her bring to bear her influence on her husband, 
brothers and sons, till they lose their individual- 
ized-clear-seeing and yield to her persuasion. It 
seems to the short-sighted a more effective method 
than the ballot every time. She has a dozen or 
more votes to her credit, while through female 
suffrage she would cast but one. This insidious 
preaching by pastors, deacons and doctors about 
woman's influence would be damnable in its ef- 
fect if it were not so ludicrous. These spiritual 
guides are really telling her to be sly, shrewd, 
persuasive— so much so that she can cajole her 
male friend to act against his conscience and bet- 
ter judgment. She becomes a veritable Eve, and 
tempts him to taste of a certain apple that she 
approves. 



WHY WOMEN ARE SLY 149 

Truly, men are too manly to be as effectively 
influenced as they pretend. To make woman feel 
that she has a godlike power in that of influence, 
thus preventing her from continually contend- 
ing for her so-called rights and therefore disturb- 
ing his mental equilibrium, he doctors her with 
these sham doses. Nor is she deceived. They are 
nothing but bread pills, and she knows it. Never- 
theless she proceeds to take him at his word and 
uses her influence for all it is worth. There is 
a charm in its application, it gives her a proxy 
power and a forged liberty, which is sufficiently 
wicked to be fascinating. In persuading him to 
go her way, though she knows that nine times 
out of ten he won't, she is laughing to herself, 
because he, in his rank honesty thinks she is in 
earnest. He knows he is trying to dupe her, but 
he never dreams that she is trying to dupe him. 
Her attempt at slyness succeeds, his fails. She 
has become constitutionally, hereditarily sly, be- 
cause of her motherhood and his physical power 
over her; but he, poor soul, cruelly straightfor- 
ward by nature, attempting her methods is a 
transparent failure. The balance could not be 
struck between man and woman and equality jus- 
tified were this not so. All things favor him as 
lord and master save one— the shrewd art of the 
negative. The negations of woman are sly powers, 
which enable her to look straight into his eyes. 
In time this fact will be modified. Never can she 
escape the prerogative of motherhood, which par- 
tially negatives herself and life, but the shuttle 
cock play indulged in through the ages between 



150 STEAIGHT GOODS IN PHILOSOPHY 

herself and man, is likely sooner or later to come 
to an end. As the individual in her dominates 
the sex, subterfuge will to an extent subside. 



PRIVILEGED PEOPLE. 

There are certainly privileged people,— why? 
Are they made of different clay from others? 
Is their pedigree royal! Are they immune from 
the law of cause and effect! Are they gods 
and goddesses? Outwardly they appear quite 
like ordinary humanity,— sometimes a little below 
par. Is that shabby genteelness of theirs a 
stamp of caste and exclusiveness, and are they 
thereby privileged! Their right and title to such 
presumptions must have a cause somewhere, but 
where? 

The privileged person in a house, any house, 
has many prerogatives. First he speaks his mind. 
Whether it be permissible on all occasions to ex- 
press oneself verbally is questioned, but in his 
case, by the virtue of his privilege, he is made 
an exception. He is privileged too in his choice 
of language. He indulges in strong terms, his 
tongue is sharp; sarcasm, pessimism or any other 
ism is tolerated in his case. The queer thing 
about it is, that he throws stones, but no one ever 
thinks of retaliating. His house is not made of 
glass. He criticises harshly, indulging in adjec- 
tives and superlatives remorselessly, and woe be 
to any one who presumes to answer him in strong 



152 STKAIGHT GOODS IN PHILOSOPHY 

epithets. He is in quite a different class in regard 
to freedom of speech from that of those whom 
he addresses. 

The reason of this is not hard to find. The 
privileged person is tolerated because in some 
manner he "makes good" and hands over a sur- 
plus to humanity which the unprivileged indi- 
vidual does not. When the favored one is good, 
he is so very, very good that he strikes a balance 
with his badness and maintains a sort of moving 
equilibrium that people call "fair." When he 
does things they are so extraordinary that the 
world forgives his chaotic moments, remember- 
ing all the time that he serves its ends rather 
more than he injures them, and some indulgence 
must be dealt out to him in order that he keep 
on doing. 

Right here let me insist, that any person not 
so fortunate, trying the methods of the privileged 
person, will soon find to his great disgust that 
they "don't work." Mankind will not tolerate 
him for an instant. "What can he do," they 
say, "to give him any right to browfbeat us? He's 
not a genius, he's no wiser than we are. He'd 
better look out. Let him once try to fix things, 
and we'll fix him!" 

When a man, then, finds himself privileged, 
there is some reason for it, most assuredly, for 
the world is inherently selfish, and only puts up 
with its tyrants because they are serving it a 
good turn. A privileged child in a family is 
either an unusually brilliant infant or an invalid. 
The sick are always more or less privileged by 



PEIVILEGED PEOPLE 153 

the nature of their value. The prospect of losing 
the invalid, even though he be hut an ordinary 
person, serves to show his worth and the diffi- 
culty of filling the void his absence will make; 
therefore he is humored and privileged. The 
genius is most inevitably privileged, even more, 
he is pampered. What he does is so transcendent, 
that what he is is winked at. He may break all 
the laws of the decalogue, and yet be forgiven. 
He can browbeat his wife, and enjoy an affinity,— 
yes two of them*. He can express opinions that 
put the gospels to shame. He can live on his 
friends and slander his enemies; for being a 
genius and preparing to leave something behind 
him that the world must forever marvel over, 
he is permitted unusual license. Like the gods, 
immortal, he walks over earth roughshod, and 
earth's inhabitants get down and kiss his foot- 
prints. But let the non-genius try to stride about 
in the same manner, and the sovereign of justice 
will transfix him before he has gone a mile. 
There are sterling reasons behind all this. The 
man who takes must give, and the non-genius 
doesn't pay the price of privileges,— " that is 
why." 

A beautiful woman is always privileged, and 
she knows it. Real beauty— the genuine thing, is 
uncommon, and is a source of supreme delight. 
Any person— a man, a child, especially a well- 
sexed woman— who can radiate beauty, scatter 
it before her and behind her in the guise of charm 
and fascination, is justifiably privileged. Any 
effort on her part to preserve that beauty, any 



154 STRAIGHT GOODS IN PHILOSOPHY 

sacrifice on the part of her friends to hold her 
high above the heads of others, is overlooked. 
She gives lavishly and takes prodigiously, and 
the balance between herself and the world is 
struck. She is privileged. 

Specialists in science are privileged persons. 
We excuse their grandiloquence and narrowness 
because of their great service. An eye specialist 
will tell you that all diseases spring from a 
wrongly focused eye. It is really, in his estima- 
tion, the only cause of suffering. Set your line 
of vision properly and you will be as healthy 
as Hebe. You laugh in your sleeve, and getting 
a good pair of lenses go to the drug shop and 
dose as before, forgiving your specialist because 
of his skill in his own particular calling. 

Another physician, of narrow but keen insight, 
announces that your appendix is the "imp of 
the perverse,' ' that without it you would be as 
athletic as Diana. Knowing his pronounced skill 
you overlook his idiosyncrasies and proceed to 
the blood doctor who desires to administer an 
" alterative" at once, solemnly asserting that 
your very life is dictated to- by certain corpuscles 
that should be given their conge on the spot. 

Your dentist tells you that on the condition 
of your mouth hinges your longevity, and being 
proud of your new gold tooth you admit his 
premise to his face, but go into hysterics behind 
his back. 

Your physical culture teacher asserts that deep 
breathing is your only hope, while a close friend 
insists that your one chance of happiness lies 



PRIVILEGED PEOPLE 155 

in mastication or a prolonged and tantalizing 
grinding of your food. 

Now these specialists are really equal to 1 things, 
in one way or another, and their absurdities are 
overlooked because of the good they do'. They 
are privileged. 

There are occasions when even an ordinary 
person becomes privileged. An ignoramus may 
rise to the rank that entitles him to special con- 
sideration if he acts as guide on a mountain 
pass, or through an unexplored forest. Being 
native to these regions, he has acquired the right 
of occasional privilege. 

About the privileged person himself there is 
something to say. You wonder if he enjoys exer- 
cising his little tyrannies, browbeating the world 
because the world cannot get on so well with- 
out him. Yes, in a sense I believe he does; 
nevertheless he realizes that he has his limit, and 
lives in dread of over-stepping it. He is also< in 
fear of other privileged individuals who by 
nature of their acquired rights are his natural 
enemies. One privileged person rarely gets down 
on his knees to another, that is certain. Notice 
the haughty air of the acknowledged beauty when 
she. sails by the acknowledged savant. Notice 
the sneer on the lips of said savant as he weighs 
her assets with his own. If a privileged person 
is tender-hearted he suffers because of the misery 
he brings about through the exercise of his pre- 
rogative. The tears of his wife and friends flow 
at his sharp words, which they are not permitted 
to resent in kind. If he has any heart he cannot 



156 STEAIGHT GOODS IN PHILOSOPHY 

fail to react from the results of his own selfish- 
ness. All his ultra indulgences outside of right 
and law have inherently within them their own 
punishment. His privilege never extends to an 
exemption from that, his privilege is a gift from 
humanity or a reward for some favor he does 
for mankind; but the inherent law of the evil 
in which he merges himself has nothing to do 
with special licenses and spares him not a jot 
or tittle from the result of his outrages. What 
cares the law for his genius or power of giving? 
Law is law, and shows no favor. 

So the privileged man, who takes to himself 
two wives outside the bans— or inside either, 
who sits down in his friend's house and stays 
there, sleeping in the best bed, devouring the 
best food, and abusing hospitality,— the genius 
who lives wilfully or ignores the law of the land, 
gets his just deserts from law itself,— privilege 
or no privilege. "A king can do no wrong," 
to be sure, but the man who represents the king 
can sin like Satan and burn in perdition. No 
privilege or special permit can save him from 
the consequences of his own acts. 

Privileges then, sifted down to this, are thrown 
in with the exchange between parties in order 
to square a deal. That is, you being able to give 
certain benefits to humanity quite out of the ordi- 
nary, get in exchange certain possibilities of indul- 
gences quite out of the ordinary also. Now there 
are persons who could have privileges and do 
not take them. They rank, however, with the 
thrice great and are not in the same category 



PKIVELEGED PEOPLE 157 

with the subjects of this paper. The people com- 
bined are headed by a sort of invisible Pope, 
who sells indulgences to those who lavish favors 
upon him; but the stern Judge who administers 
the law accepts no bribes and shows no partiality. 



PROBLEMS. 

Why are there great financiers if the problem 
of money-making is not itself a thing of interest? 
The millionaire is surely endowed with enough 
of this world's goods for actual comfort. As 
well might I ask, why do men play chess? The 
zest in living is the fascination of the problem. 
To disentangle a puzzle and clear up a mystery 
is pre-eminently satisfactory. The problem is 
the mental grindstone that sharpens the mind to 
a clean edge. At the chessboard of life sits the 
financier and plays the game. The king he hopes 
to checkmate is called Money. The charm of 
the playing is greater than that of the success; 
in fact the problem is the real thing and the solu- 
tion but a bagatelle. 

People protest and rebel continually against 
the difficulties in their way, the uncertainties, 
the distractions; but suppose these obstacles were 
removed suddenly and the sea of life reduced to 
a dead level,— what then? Previous complaints 
would be as syren echoes compared with the up- 
roar of protest that would batter the eardrums at 
the dead monotony of such a condition. Life would 
be insufferable without the problem, in fact 
would cease, and stagnation would reign supreme. 



PROBLEMS 159 

The lure of the puzzle is the charm of being. It 
arouses all our -activities in the attempt at a 
solution, and the fury of endeavor is the fullness 
of being. 

The man who falls flat before opposition and 
does not try with all his might to make the 
most of it, is really no man at all, but a thing 
unsexed and unequal to the rich experiences of 
the battle of life. The problem of maintaining 
my body equal to the demand of my soul is 
interesting; the problem of establishing a body 
for my body, that is, a roof over my head and 
foundation under my feet, is another vital 
puzzle, problem of clothes for my back inci- 
dentally going with it. The problems of fuel, 
climate, food, keep men busy from "sun up to sun 
down" in their effort to solve them. The prob- 
lems of education, race, environment, the adapta- 
tion of humanity to frigid, torrid and temperate 
conditions plunges the man of affairs deep in 
thought. The problem of supply and demand, 
social and economic relations,— the questions of 
war, peace, commerce, international law, tax 
legal and executive brains to the limit. The 
problems of love, hate, equity, caste, the puzzle 
of the passions, the sex question, the horns of 
the dilemma— respectively man and woman. The 
problem of the small, the problem of the great, 
and lastly the stupendous problem of knowledge, 
inclusive of all others the very sphinx of life 
itself. 

Imagine a heaven with everything settled, com- 
plete, done, if you can. No more thinking, no 



160 STRAIGHT GOODS IN PHILOSOPHY 

more speculating, no more wondering, guessing, 
imagining, fearing,— but everything shelved and 
finished; yourselves before the throne, with no 
question mark stamped on you,— so vastly wise 
that all curiosity lies dead within you ; all worlds 
.conquered, all problems solved. Alas! even God 
could not endure such stagnation, so perforce 
he made Adam and Eve, and endowed them with 
freedom, that he himself might have a question 
to determine, a puzzle to work out. This is not 
sacrilege but verity, for by no possibility could 
there be life, the other name of which is action, 
without the element of obstacle or resistence in- 
volved. Men are mostly " kickers,' 9 not realiz- 
ing that when they turn on the problems of their 
existence and revile them, they are condemning 
their best friends. The wholesome anger with 
which we sometimes attack a difficulty is not to 
be altogether condemned. "Our blood up" we 
fight hard, and having cleared our path find 
considerable satisfaction. Considerable, I say, 
but certainly not supreme, for the job done we 
at once look about for another, quite unsettled 
until we "get busy" again. No healthy man 
rests long and gloats over his laurels. The real 
fun of the contest was the battle itself; the 
reward following was but a secondary interest. 
Even in the problem of love, in the act of win- 
ning, a man is intoxicated by the west wind 
blowing off the shores of his distant elysium; 
having won he settles himself comfortably, but 
not with rapture, to inhale the appetizing, odor- 
ous breezes of the family kitchen. He "builds 



PROBLEMS 161 

him a house," where he may obtain perfect 
harmony, absolute rest, domestic bliss and para- 
dise. While constructing this future haven of 
delights, he is superlatively happy; but let the 
house be finished, himself in slippers and gown 
established inside, and bliss takes wings, his 
skylark becomes a crow, and he is glum and 
morose with disappointment. He eats too much, 
he drinks too much, he smokes too much; he 
wants to sell, he wants to travel, he wishes he 
had his money back. He says to himself, "The 
fool builds the house and the wise man lives in 
it. I must get out of this," and he gets out, and 
starts off on the trail of another problem. All 
showing clearly that the bird of paradise hovers 
over the game and departs when it is won. 

I do not wish to be misunderstood in this 
argument. There are difficulties too great to be 
enticing; there is a degree of "tiredness" that 
demands surcease of action. One thus weary 
craves only to float with the tide of being, let- 
ting things settle themselves, finding in this state 
of mental and physical exhaustion his heaven in 
negation, sleep, rest. This however, being a phase 
of rhythm is but temporary, 'and serves as a 
preparation for more hard work and discovery. 

Of all the problems, that of death and the 
possible hereafter is perhaps the most fascinating. 
While the prospect hangs over us like a pall, 
black and uncertain, it has its charm, and secret- 
ly we are all looking forward to it with both 
dread and rapture, somewhat as a girl contem- 
plates marriage. The fact of this great change, 



162 STRAIGHT GOODS EN PHILOSOPHY 

sure sometime to be ours, takes the ennui from 
the life of the most passe and blase individual, 
and clothes him with expectancy. Tired of all 
else, death, awful as it may be, is at least ex- 
citing, a thing unsolved, and the thick slow- 
flowing blood of the rankest pessimist mounts 
to his brain at the thought of it. 

The beginning and ending of life is a veritable 
Chinese puzzle, and all that goes between like 
wine to the blood if we once become aware of 
the charm of the problem. 



FEAR AND WORRY. 

It is the fashion nowadays to condemn fear 
and anathematize worry, but we have failed to 
annihilate them nevertheless. Why? Because 
fear and worry are inherent in the "make up" 
of the man and serve a purpose. Fear as a 
characteristic has its virtue in being a safeguard 
and protector. The use of fear and the abuse 
of fear produce vastly different results. A tem- 
perate fear leads one to be cautious and care- 
ful, preventing innumerable accidents that would 
otherwise occur. An intemperate fear culminates 
in panic, which in itself is the worst accident 
of all. The former modifies and subdues our 
rashness, the latter makes us cowards and ner- 
vous wrecks. 

The fearless and the fearful man represent 
the extremes, and between them we have the indi- 
vidual who uses common sense in regard to his 
precautions. He worries reasonably, until his 
"powder is dry," then secure in its protective 
value he throws off dull care and proceeds to 
enjoy himself. He locks his door and forgets 
the thief. He insures his life, and then lives. 
This is the reasonable man. After doing what 
he can to prevent disaster he thinks no more 
about it. 



164 STRAIGHT GOODS IN PHILOSOPHY 

It is otherwise with the fearful individual, 
whom some people condemn as a coward. He 
is afraid and afraid and still more afraid. About 
his body he worries continually, believing all 
diseases instead of being possible, are more than 
probable in his case. He is afraid not only of 
a complaint, but of the doctor who might dis- 
cover it. Symptoms scare him, and a lack of 
symptoms frightens him still more. He doses 
slyly on the guess-work principle, and trembles 
at the possible result. He is afraid to take medi- 
cine and afraid not to take medicine. He is 
frightened if his heart beats, and alarmed at the 
prospect of its stopping altogether. Unless he 
temporarily forgets himself his body tortures 
him with the alarms it generates. He is afraid 
to travel and afraid to stay at home; he fully 
realizes the sneaking dangers of his own back- 
yard,— his sewer pipes, drains and pitfalls; he 
fears his neighbor's dog and the scratch of his 
friend's cat. If terrified to the flying point he 
starts on a journey, he gets himself insured, and 
proceeds to contemplate disasters of every de- 
scription, from that of missing his car to* a train 
wreck, dwelling morbidly on the shadings of 
evil entailed on one who traverses the spaces, 
skimming over sea and land. 

Prom the financial point a man of this type 
is in dread of "setting up in business for him- 
self ' lest the risk be too great, and mightily 
afraid to serve anyone else, on account of the 
responsibility. He is afraid to do nothing and 
afraid to do something. He sees the poor house 



FEAE AND WOERY 165 

ahead if he takes chances, and he sees it again 
if de does not. He is afraid to "get married,' ' 
and still more afraid of single blessedness. A 
wife might fall ill and become a burden, or he 
might fall ill and have no wife to care for him; 
either way he scents danger. As for becoming 
a father, he hates to "chance it," yet if he does 
not he fears a lonely old age with no one to 
cheer him in his declining years. On the other 
hand, he might breed criminals and live to see 
his son hanged. He's afraid of the hereafter, 
but fears to join any special church lest some 
other special church turn out to be a safer sail- 
ing craft to the port of the unknown. 

Altogether this extremist in the art of worry 
is so fanatically burning with panic that the 
world laughs at him and frightens him still more. 

But the man who is "afraid of nothing" is 
almost as ridiculous. Such a fellow is well de- 
picted in a dime novel. No enemy daunts him. 
He has never known fright. If a house burns, 
he goes where fireman fear to tread, and nearly 
chokes to death. In a case of drowning he 
plunges into the breakers and starts out to res- 
cue the victim. Whether he can swim or not, 
makes no difference; he dares the water and 
probably gets the worst of it. A man of this 
type knows nothing of small worries about his 
stomach, liver, heart, "coming down" with a 
serious illness; he pays so little attention to it 
that he is likely to succumb before a physician 
gets on his track, but should the doctor reach 
him in time our rash patient has no fear of him, 



168 STKAIGHT GOODS IN PHILOSOPHY 

and invites an X-ray inspection with keen relish. 
Told he must die, he is quite free from terror 
and shows no dread of the undertaker whom he 
knows is hovering near like a black crow, waiting 
for his opportunity,— which in the undertaker's 
case is never allowed to slip. 

Such an extremist in the art of bravery plunges 
recklessly into matrimony, and is under no cir- 
cumstance afraid of his wife. Regarding father- 
hood, as far as fear goes he would as soon be 
a father as not. He is extravagant in money 
matters, and has no dread whatever of a panic. 
For him poverty has no terrors, nor has wealth. 
He is not afraid of dependence nor its contrary. 
If a burglar enters his house he chases him out, 
aye, he follows him to the very den of thieves, 
where he promptly receives a stunning blow on 
the head and, dime novel fashion, is bound hand 
and foot, gagged and left alone in a cellar. Un- 
daunted, if he manages to escape he follows up 
his enemies and gets his skull cracked again. He 
is an utterly fearless person,— out in the dark 
at night prowling the streets, where "hold-up 
men" ply their trade; in rocky, suspicious look- 
ing mountain canyons, where rattlesnakes and 
poison oak flourish; visiting friends down with 
smallpox, with never a sign of vaccination on 
him; hard up at the door of an enemy striving 
to borrow with no false shame in his eyes, as 
unalarmed about his future state as the babe 
new-born. 

What is the philosophy of all this! Which 
extremist is the fool? I answer, both. To be 



FEAR AND WOEEY 167 

sure we admire the man of dash, and daring, 
while we despise the panicky coward, yet neither 
is sane nor reasonable in his method. 

Should I carry out to the letter the modern 
"saws," "Don't Worry," "Fear Nothing," etc., 
I should undoubtedly forget my engagements, 
fail to keep my promises, miss my train, neglect 
my health, overdraw my bank account, become 
indifferent to my morals, and imperil my im- 
mortal soul. Using judgment, I propose to worry 
and fear sufficiently to "keep the wtolf from my 
door" and the thief from my trousers' pocket. 
I shall muzzle my hound in "dog days" and fly 
to cover in a storm. Having done all that, I 
do not propose to brood. Worry and fear serve 
a good purpose in giving warning of danger 
and stirring me to activity as regards preven- 
tive ways and means. After that, they are 
enemies and take on the grotesque and absurd 
features of the great god Pan, who piped till 
he raised a panic and then piped some more. 

Without a reasonable amount of precaution 
superinduced by anxiety, the world could not go 
on in an orderly manner for any length of time. 
The cosmic balance hinges on the alertness of 
the watchman on the lookout, and that watch- 
man is named Pear. Like pain he has his mis- 
sion, and when he does not abuse it, like pain, 
again he becomes a savior. We may pretend 
that the gospel of "Don't Worry" is the last 
word in scientific philosophy, but if we had 
keener insight we should change the phrase to 
"Don't Worry Unnecessarily." Having worried 



168 STRAIGHT GOODS IN PHILOSOPHY 

sufficiently to do my best for myself and others, 
I have no call to waste more energy along that 
line. Of course this is "easier said than done." 
A mother hanging over her sick child has most 
certainly accomplished everything within her 
power for its relief, and yet she worries. But 
her case is extreme, we must excuse her. In the 
thousand and one little things where our intense 
affections are not involved, it is certainly un- 
philosophic to waste our strength in foolish 
fear and anxiety. In so doing we become a bur- 
den to ourselves and a "bare" to others. There 
is nothing more wearing to a man's nervous 
system than to be constantly thrown in company 
with those who are "eaten up with anxiety." 
Such individuals air their troubles continually, 
and make nuisances of themselves. 

The one and only justifiable great fear, it 
seems to me, is that of being afraid of fear itself. 
Perhaps I am wrong, for to be terrified by fear 
permits of a fearful attitude of mind, which it 
were probably better not to encourage. Well 
then, how shall we ward off panic if we are not 
permitted to be afraid of it? By the under- 
standing, most certainly. Having a clear com- 
prehension of what the nature of panic is, and 
the danger involved in allowing it to assert 
itself, we steer clear of it. 

We must remember that Fear is an emotion, not 
an intellectual concept. It is a spontaneous re- 
action from something that seems about to 
injure us, nevertheless so closely allied to intel- 
lect that it is more or less colored by it. We 



FEAE AND WOEEY 169 

can reason ourselves into being afraid, and we 
can reason ourselves out again. Talk calmly 
and convincingly to a man half paralyzed with 
fright, and he will gradually get his equilibrium 
and overcome his terror. On the other hand, 
by appealing to his reason through argument 
you can throw him into a panic, convincing him 
that dire disaster is close by. 

Eeason then is the means by which we regulate 
fear, exciting it sufficiently to make us cautious 
and self -protecting, or subduing it enough to pre- 
vent extreme tension and positive terror. 

Fear is apt to be attendant upon some other 
emotion, in fact is often the dim shadow of an 
exalted passion. The mother fears for her chil- 
dren because she adores them; the lover fears for 
his beloved because he worships her. The miser 
lives in terror because he gloats on his gold. A 
man otherwise brave is often reduced to coward- 
ice through love of his family and anxiety about 
them. 

Pear like hope is a doubtful friend, faithful to 
a degree, after that an enemy. You can hope 
against hope, which deferred "maketh the heart 
sick." You can go on worrying till you yourself 
are fear embodied, frightful to your friends and 
a menace to mankind. 

The intangible quality of fear, its uncertainty 
and procrastination, make it in the long run an 
exasperating sensation, embittering and chaotic. 
You say to yourself, "I would prefer to know the 
worst than to continue to feel this way." The 
element of expectancy, the sense of something ter- 



170 STRAIGHT GOODS IN PHILOSOPHY 

rible impending becomes in time beyond endur- 
ance, and panic ensues. 

The philosopher, while he knows fear and 
anxiety under the mask of caution, prudence and 
carefulness, is quite content to stop his acquaint- 
ance there. Its more intense manifestations, such 
as terror and frenzy, he strives ever to avoid. 



THE JEWEL IN THE TOAD'S HEAD. 

Ugly as the toad appears, nevertheless there is 
a shining bit of cartilage in his head, as beautiful 
as a gem; and so from time immemorial " the jewel 
in the toad's head" has been recognized not only 
literally but illustratively. If the repulsive and 
hideous manifest some points of beauty, it should 
certainly be the aim of all truth seekers to dis- 
cover and value it. 

There are things which we consider inherently 
evil, some aspects of life seem without excuse, 
ugly, offensive, quite devoid of any redeeming 
quality. Wait! there's a jewel in the toad's head; 
somewhere in this evil of ours is the sparkling 
splendor of a gem that makes the dread horror 
of the rest bearable, or if not bearable, at least 
understandable. Gn every possible aspect of 
physical, mental and spiritual ugliness,— on every 
grief, bereavement, pain, shame, or degradation, 
a light flashes, the gleam of the jewel in the very 
head of it, a gleam so clear that it serves to 
explain and almost justify the deformity which 
otherwise would be a symbol of despair. 

Some kind of gain comes out and manifests in 
every loss. A scintillating, uncanny gem that 
flashes in lurid splendor on the chaos of misery 



172 STRAIGHT GOODS IN PHILOSOPHY 

and miserableness. Let me illustrate: Perhaps 
your self-respect has disappeared, and with it 
your decency and honor. You may have broken 
every one of the ten commandments, sinning 
also against intrinsic law itself. You have de- 
graded your whole being; you have stolen, lied 
and debauched yourself; you have tasted of every 
evil, and your innermost self is vile. Where in the 
name of all decency is the jewel in the toad's head 
in your case? So bad are you that this possible 
gem has but one flash, one glow; it has no facets 
and no varied scintillation, but that one steady 
shine is there nevertheless, and cannot be hid. 
Bad as you are, the jewel that lights your way is 
that of experience, and has no less dignified name 
than that of knowledge. Your touch of pitch has 
bedaubed you with its blackness, and its jet is a 
gem and reflects facts. Knowledge is yours in 
spite of you; its hatefulness and nastiness cannot 
put out the truth that shines in it as such, miser- 
able though it be. And by this knowledge you 
may eventually be saved and delivered. The light 
of this knowledge flashes from the gem of jet, 
and shows you the way to better things and a 
fairer life. No one knows contrasts as do you, no 
one realizes cleanness as do you who have been 
vile, no one bows before purity as do you who are 
impure, no one appreciates honor, even to the point 
of envy, as do you who are dishonorable, no one 
adores beauty as do you who are ugly, no one 
trembles before truth as do you who are a liar. 
And all because of the jewel in the toad's head— 
your head. Out of your vast intercourse with evil 



THE JEWEL IN THE TOAD'S HEAD 173 

has come your power to estimate values, and that 
power is the jewel which is especially your -own. 
It is sombre but it flashes, and is not an imitation 
but a real gem. 

No condition or state of evil is conceivable but 
that some brilliant sparkles in its darkest place. 
The sanctum sanctorum of the unholy is lighted 
by a jewel which has intrinsic worth, and not only 
the unholy but the unhappy also. The sombre 
and pessimistic good, people who walk in shadows 
of their own or others' making, have gems con- 
cealed or revealed about them, as the case may be. 
The complaining man by his continual unfair pro- 
tests against things as they are in his case, but 
serves by the light of the gem in him to bring into 
prominence those who bear like burdens patiently 
without complaint. Some strange lurid light, 
opaline and resplendent, makes a foil of the back- 
biter and slanderer by which is seen more dis- 
tinctly the man of clean soul and cautious tongue. 
The rubies that drop from the knife of the mur- 
derer as he draws it from the heart of his victim 
dance forever before the eyes of humanity and 
teach the world the dread awfulness of taking 
human life. Even the hunter who steals like a 
hound along the trail of his victim has the emerald 
light in his eyes and his soul, for which caution 
and fox-like shrewdness stand. All those who 
revel in danger, those who do, dare and suffer for 
the sake of conquest and achievement, are lighted 
by diamond flashes cold as ice and hot as fire. 

Looking deeper, I find there is no real, re^- 
splendent good as such, but that has its evil aspect, 



174 STBAIGHT GOODS IN PHILOSOPHY 

and in that evil aspect is a gem,— not the jewel 
of good per se, but the veritable pearl of great 
price, the gem that is paid for by sin and bereave- 
ment and pain. For instance, suppose I am 
healthy, wealthy and happy— thrice good, so to 
speak; on this very account I have a deep-seated 
anxiety as regards my power of holding on to 
these blessings indefinitely. This very unhappi- 
ness about my happiness gives me keenness to 
estimate values, and is a blessing in disguise,— 
in other words, a jewel in the toad's head. Not 
that worry is in itself good, but the caution born 
therefrom is exceedingly good, enabling me to 
maintain possession of those delights which I 
might otherwise through carelessness lose. Jeal- 
ousy, contemptible as it is, has a jewel in its head 
nevertheless, shining brightly enough to reveal 
one's self to one's self with all the cavern-like pos- 
sibilities and pitfalls otherwise unknown. It 
shows the danger of rampant fascination, and the 
blissful anxieties of overweening love. It is a 
gem of great light, intense, electric, searching. 
The mean little thief plies his debasing trade by 
the glimmer of his tiny jewel, which, garnet-like, 
shines sufficiently to teach him that a code of 
honor among those who steal is quite essential in 
order to make stealing possible. It shows him, 
too, the better way of honesty by force of contrast, 
and makes him forever restless and dissatisfied 
with his lot. 

The scarlet woman wears a gem on her heart 
radiant with fire which burns and tortures. The 
purity of an innocent child is realized by her as 



THE JEWEL IN THE TOAD'S HEAD 175 

by no other because of her impurity. Fallen, no 
one appreciates as she appreciates the human 
being that stands erect. By the light of this jewel 
she sees the broken hearts of her sisters in shame 
as no other can see, and by the knowledge gained 
through painfully clear vision, she and she only 
can be the savior of herself and those like unto her. 

The gem of sickness is the pearl. The diseased, 
the halt, the blind,— those physically accursed, by 
the very disease itself, create, whether or no 1 , the 
pearl born of their misery. It is a clouded jewel, 
varying in gleam like the sun from dawn to even- 
ing. In the breast of the pearl, as on the bosom of 
the sea, the tides rise and fall, but the light is there 
as. in a mirror, and the patient sufferer sees his 
own face reflected from its sheen and a divine un- 
earthliness also that implies higher planes of 
being, and a disintegration of gross matter into 
more ethereal elements. It often throws upon the 
screen of itself the very image of death, like an 
angel of light, a welcome visitor eagerly embraced. 
It reflects Hebe also, the image of health, and 
teaches the invalid values in hygiene that were 
never before dreamed of. 

The gem of poverty is the turquoise,— like the 
clear sky. Poverty is often toad-like in its squalor 
and uncleanness. Purity is expensive, water costs 
money, time is cash, and the poor are too tired to 
keep clean. Now the sky when blue like the tur- 
quoise is stainless, and who like the unclean 
poor can realize the value of purity? The sky 
like wealth is boundless to him who is poverty- 
stricken. The vastness of the great comes to him 



176 STRAIGHT GOODS IN PHILOSOPHY 

who has nothing. Ho dreams of domains and pal- 
aces, kingdoms and principalities. His power of 
appreciation of abundance is beyond the concep- 
tion of the well-to-do. Ennui he never knows ; his 
life is so strenuous that it becomes exciting and 
intense. Every hour is a tragedy escaped or 
experienced, every minute vital and problemat- 
ical. But the jewel shines softly, in azures impal- 
pable, and whether he knows it or not as a gem, 
he certainly realizes an indefinable something 
which makes his poverty endurable and instruct- 
ive. 

And these are but a few instances of the innu- 
merable forms that evil assumes. Evil as evil will 
have nothing to do with light, but intrinsically by 
the nature of Law the jewel is there. The toad's 
head has developed its own gem by the nature and 
virtue of its ugliness. Lilies on a pond of slime 
serve as a commonplace illustration but pat just 
here. Evil cannot help bringing forth some form 
of good by its nature as evil. It is the stalking 
shadow that acts as a foil to reveal intrinsic worth, 
and that power to be a foil is as a power good. 
No contrast nor comparison would be made pos- 
sible without the aid of that which man calls 
evil,— no appreciation of values. Even Satan has 
his mission to perform when he poses as a mirror 
to reveal the saint. The arch fiend himself, the 
very Devil, serves the end and intent of being 
when by the fire of the eyes of him God in heaven 
is made manifest. 



THE LAW OF OPPOSITES, 

A law we believe is eternal, so there is no need 
to go back in history to find the beginning of it. 
Nevertheless it is interesting to trace out its dis- 
coverers, to examine their application, and the 
results accruing therefrom. 

Now the law of opposites is spoken of in past 
ages as the identity of contraries, and was foisted 
upon the world at a very early time by the great 
thinkers. It is true, as is well known, that the 
masters in every country brought up at the para- 
dox; or to make it clearer, Zarathushtra;, Pytha- 
goras, Laotze, Gautama and Jesus met at an 
apparent point, that in reality was no point at 
all,— simply the passing or blending place of the 
extremes. A person, not subtle, calls this point 
or blending place a contradiction, but a thinker 
understands that on the contrary it is a paradox. 
Things that contradict each other are impossible 
of blending, but a paradox is quite another ques- 
tion. 

Now upon the paradox hinges the law of oppo- 
sites, which in simpler parlance might be called 
the law of rhythm. Zarathushtra,, or Zoroaster, as 
he is commonly called, apparently taught dualism ; 
that there were two principles in nature, the good 



178 STKAIGHT GOODS IN PHILOSOPHY 

and evil, under the guise of Ahuro Mazdao (Or- 
muzd) —Light, and Angro Mamyush (Ahriman) 
—Darkness. In the Gathas or sacred books, the 
evil spirit is less prominent than the good. In 
Mazdaism, as the faith of Zoroaster is called, the 
good is so entirely uppermost that it seems to be 
all in all. 

Now this dualism is as old as history, and is an 
extremely common belief among the followers of 
all masters. The followers we say, for not a single 
master that we can discover believed it. You will 
notice as you sift the cult of the almost mythical 
Zoroaster that these apparently two principles in 
Nature come together, being twins proceeding 
from the fundamental law of Unity. As surely as 
day is comprehended because of night and night 
because of day, so were the light and darkness of 
this great leader of Iran based emphatically and 
everlastingly upon One, and their meeting was the 
identification of contraries and the passage of 
extremes. 

But let us get away from Persia and look into 
Ancient Greece. Another almost fabled individ- 
ual, born probably about 582 B. C, called Pytha- 
goras, who* made of geometry a science, presented 
the identity of contraries, or the law of opposites. 
These opposites were unity and duality, or num- 
ber and one; in modern terms we should say 
variety in unity,— variety standing for the number 
of Pythagoras, and unity for one. In the union 
of these opposites (that is the blending point be- 
tween the two) consists harmony or neutrality. 
Suppose we take a simple illustration. Blend 1 



THE LAW OF OPPOSITES 179 

black and white,— opposites, and what do- you 
get but a neutral tint, or gray? Blend night and 
day, and what do you get but neutrality, dawn, or 
the gloaming— evening. Blend love and hate,— 
opposites, and what do you get but the rather 
comfortable neutral state of indifference? 

The basic philosophy of classic Hellas, then, 
upon which the later philosophies were grafted, 
was that dualistic monism— if it may be so 
called— which is apparently two, but in reality 
one. Over in old China still further back, about 
604 B. C, there lived a master who is supposed to 
be the author of the book called Tao-teh King. 
This master's name was Laotze, and he taught 
the identity of contraries. Later on he had a dis- 
ciple probably as great as himself, who stood to 
the original as did Paul to Jesus. Chaung Tzu 
left much written matter behind him. Let us 
quote a few passages. 

"To know that east and wtest are convertible 
and yet necessary terms, is the due adjustment of 
functions. For instance, any given point is of 
course east in relation to west, west in relation to 
east; but absolutely it may be said that its west- 
ness does not include its eastness, or that it is 
neither east nor west." 

Again he says: "If we say that anything is 
good or evil because it is either good or evil in our 
eyes, then there is nothing which is not good, 
nothing which is not evil. To know that Tao and 
Chieh were both good and both evil from their 
opposite points of view, this is the expression of 
a standard. Therefore those who would have right 



180 STRAIGHT GOODS IN PHILOSOPHY 

without its correlative wrong, or good without its 
correlative misrule, they do not comprehend the 
great principles of the universe. One might as 
well talk of the existence of heaven without that 
of earth, or the negative principle without the 
positive, which is clearly absurd.' ' 

Now after having quoted these passages from 
Chaung Tzu, Laotze's most brilliant pupil, you 
are likely to retort, "He was only an Ancient, and 
we do not base our judgment upon the Ancients." 
Very well, then, drop the name of Chaung Tzu 
altogether, forget that Laotze was ever born, wipe 
Zoroaster off the slate of history, bury Pytha- 
goras out of sight, look upon the dualistic, mon- 
istic prince Biddartha as a myth, forget the mag- 
nificent exposition of the same fundamental truth 
given out by the Nazarene. And yet I present to 
your incredulity something still more ancient than 
are they all in the fact of law itself. T challenge 
and defy you to disprove it. This principle can no 
more be ignored than can that of repulsion and 
attraction, for if you did but know it, it hinges 
upon this selfsame law as surely as rhythm is 
rhythm and tides are tides. The identity of con- 
traries reduced to physics is the law of action and 
reaction, contraction and expansion, or, expressed 
in one stupendous term,— POLARITY. He that 
can freeze with hate can burn with love, he that 
can save can spend, he that can suffer can enjoy, 
he that can look down can raise his eyes, he that 
hath a future hath a past. A heaven implies a 
hell. And what is this but rhythm, or action and 
reaction, a going out and coming in, an inhaling 



THE LAW OF OPPOSITES 181 

and exhaling, a night and day, an ebb and flow? 
And the meeting point of these extremes is One. 
This meeting point I say is neutrality, poise, ap- 
proximate balance, Nirvana, rest ; the shadows are 
soft and gray and tender, without passion, with- 
out fire. 

The irony of all this is that we know; it so sub- 
consciously that we fail to utilize our knowledge. 
This is no fable, let me tell you, but "The One 
Thing.' 9 To bring this law into practice is to 
apply the mathematics of Pythagoras to our daily 
lives, to take stock of our rhythm and discover 
how the tide stands. Is it coming in or going out? 
Will the law of the laws, somehow or other we 
sit on the crest of the wave, if we do but know 
it, a law unto ourselves. And when extremes 
come verging together in the surging vortex of 
being, we balance like philosophers and find our- 
selves again on a new crest, uninjured by our 
plunge into the depths below. There is no hell 
deep enough to hold a master long. He scales its 
sides and peers over the brim of it, in spite of a 
legion of devils marshalled by Satan himself. And 
because the Sage descends to the infernal regions 
he discovers the beauty of heaven. Jesus de- 
scended into hell and then went up — up! Could 
he ever have risen if he had not been down? The 
very very wise court suffering, even to that of a 
cross. Sorrow is pregnant and as surely as the 
seed sprouts will bring forth a child called Joy. 



THE ABSOLUTE. 

A stupendous subject, and you may well won- 
der that I, or any other dare to write about 
it. Beversely you can as reasonably assert 
that it has been worn threadbare. Either way it 
is a presumptuous undertaking, which neverthe- 
less I shall attempt. 

Now in beginning I must know the meaning 
or meanings of the term, and proceed from the 
base of a definition. I shall set aside all pre- 
liminary ones, such as certain, infallible, peremp- 
tory, complete, entire, ultimate, immeasurable, 
etc., and argue at once from the metaphysical 
definition of the word as a noun. 

The absolute about which I intend to write 
is "that which is free from restriction," the un- 
conditioned, independent of relations; in other 
words, the opposite of the relative. It is a 
totality, but not infinity. 

I am aware that my definitions may be con- 
tested, but as long as my argument is true to 
them, it does not matter. 

Now my appeal is to the ordinary thinker, 
whose prejudices have not been maintained 
through the influence of others. Can you, plain 
man, find some one thing in life which you are 
sure of, and can honestly define as absolute? 
Now think! Is there an existent something in 



THE ABSOLUTE 183 

things themselves that is uniform, alike in all,— 
that maintaining relationship, is not in itself 
relative? Something you cannot see 1 , hear, taste, 
smell or handle, which nevertheless you are per- 
fectly certain is free from restriction and uncon- 
ditioned? "Yes," you answer, "the law of the 
relativities or the principle which governs them; 
it has totality and unity, is alike in all and con- 
ditioned by none." Your answer is well taken, 
but you must remember that you are now speak- 
ing of the first principle, the ultimate, not its 
secondary manifestations which we call the laws, 
for they hinge upon and modify each other. Fur- 
ther, this first principle which you may call 
absolute, has a way of appearing as dual, or as 
two principles, thus apparently stultifying its 
absoluteness and seemingly conditioning itself. 
In fact it has a reverse aspect, and, to him who 
is not sufficiently subtle, resolves itself into dual- 
ism, and thence into pluralism. A law that shall 
seem to draw all things toward a common center 
and by the nature of its intensity in so doing neces- 
sarily cause repulsion, is split in two, so to speak, 
and is spoken of as two principles instead of 
one. Now the real absoluteness of such a law— 
call it gravity if you will— lies in the fact that 
no matter how definitely repulsion asserts itself, 
the gravity still holds; the principle is unchanged 
and its effect unmodified in spite of its tangent 
possibilities. In fact these same possibilities 
but serve to prove the law upon which they rest. 
In no way can we effect unity among diverse 
things unless there is one element in common 



184 STRAIGHT GOODS IN PHILOSOPHY 

between them. Variety strikes the senses as we 
look out upon the world. No two things are the 
same, many are radically different one from the 
other. Through the five senses we discover 
the multiplicities, but by these same senses con- 
jointly or through the sense of the senses, that 
is through a sort of psychical mental touch, we 
realize that in them all is the self-existent or 
absolute law. But, you say, the very law is utter- 
ly dependent upon the things which it unites; 
that without things there would be no law of 
them, therefore this principle itself is relative, 
and your absolute is a dream of the brain. . 

Now! we have reached the crux of the question. 
If we assert a beginning of things as such, your 
assumption is well taken. The law of things 
could not precede them— by its very nature, 
neither could things precede the law. If the law 
is eternal, multiplicity in some form is eternal also. 
Then you may well ask why things as such are 
not absolute too. And I answer, that things by 
their inherent tendency to change, which change 
alone makes them various, are not absolute; but 
the law of change, which is but the reverse aspect 
of the law of unity, is absolute. And this is no 
quibble. Change, which is the pronounced fac- 
tor in relationship, is itself changeless. As law 
it is unity reversely aspected. 

The unconditioned then is law without begin- 
ning or end, and things are its opposite or eter- 
nally conditioned manifestation. But, you argue, 
law is conditioned by its own nature; it is hard, 
fixed, unalterable. Here we hold up the horns 



THE ABSOLUTE 185 

of the dilemma and find that they belong to one 
Being. Unity, which is law manifesting, is for- 
ever uniting that which is not hard, fixed and 
unalterable. As law, it is absolutely given over 
to dealing with change; as law it makes the 
volatile and changeable possible, in fact is ab- 
solute as change. As surely as it is absolute as 
rigidity, it is legally united to change. It is 
absolute change and absolute rigidity— a para- 
dox but not a contradiction. The change can 
only be produced by fixity, and the unity can 
only be produced by multiplicity. A garden of 
incomparable flowers grows from the unifying 
quality of the river that waters it. One stream 
permeates all the plants, one liquid makes many 
manifestations possible. This is but a surface 
illustration, and is not true to the probe, never- 
theless it will do>, as no simile can possibly ex- 
plain the subtlety of law. Now this absolute 
law with its manifestation in things, in its finality 
we know nothing about. We can understand, 
however, its paradoxical nature as far as mind 
can reach, and grasp its absoluteness as such. Is 
it Being? As far as power and its expressions 
go, it most certainly is. Is it God? As far as 
we can mentally grasp a sense of totality, our- 
selves included— yes. Then what are things, and 
why bother about them? 

Eight here let me say, that our universe is 
made up of things, our life is in and among 
things, our hell and heaven hinge upon things. 
The only way we can realize this law is through 
things^ We ourselves are things. Their very 



186 STKAIGHT GOODS IN PHILOSOPHY 

changeableness is their glory, their chameleon 
charm is our paradise, their relativities make the 
one thing our supreme joy. You cannot say 
that things are included in the law! of them, any 
more than you can say that they include the law. 
The absolute and relative are polarized aspects 
of totality. One is no way superior to the other. 
The pole conditioned is not the pole uncondi- 
tioned—that is all. Do the poles condition each 
other then? you ask. I answer that the totality 
includes its poles, and as a unity it stands as 
absolute or manifested law, because this law is 
of itself unity. Its nature is that of complete- 
ness,— a freedom from restrictions. 

Can I understand the absolute? No, because 
all reason deals with the conditioned or relative. 
Can I realize the absolute? Yes, just as I am 
conscious of gravity by its pull, without com- 
prehending it. Beason by its nature deals with 
the many. Law by its nature, as far as I realize 
it, acts as One. It is the Tao of Laotze, which 
permeates everything yet is no thing. Energy 
is beyond me, law is beyond me, as far as 
brain power and intellect go, but I feel the 
absolute. When pluralism denies the absolute 
it exorcises itself, for there could be no plu- 
ralism without its absolute pole of unity. The 
Pragmatist harps irritably upon the practical 
but there could be no practicable without the 
impracticable. The Solipsist argues that he 
alone lives the Solitary; but there can be no 
isolation without the crowd. Time and space 
are said to annihilate the unconditioned, but 



THE ABSOLTJTE 187 

there can be no unconditioned without time and 
space. As relative as I myself am— made 
up of an infinity of parts, of one thing am I sure, 
and that is the principle of principles that regu- 
lates my own multiplicity. Should I call it God, 
because in my emotion I so construe it, who, I 
ask, can deny my claim? "Is the Absolute fate, 
and have I no free will?" No, it is not fate, 
and I have a free will. The Absolute is impos- 
sible without my free will. It is on that same 
free will its absoluteness hinges. My free will 
necessitates multiplicity, and multiplicity necessi- 
tates the absolute. This is not blasphemy. I am 
using intellect now in my effort to* comprehend 
a prerogative of absoluteness as such. If there 
were not things to choose between and to desire, 
I should have no will, nor could I be I,— an indi- 
vidual, nor could there be a law of absolute unity, 
for there would be nothing to unify. The very 
absoluteness or changelessness of this principle 
demands that which changes, namely, things and 
the will that roves among them. It is thing as 
opposed to things, or "the thing in itself," mani- 
festing as things. 

Fate, then, in the finality of thinking, is a mean- 
ingless term; secondarily along with the epithet 
chance, it is tolerated. 

You have read of the "everlasting arms,"— the 
real and only resting place. I fully believe this 
enfolding embrace, which man may realize if he 
will, is none other than that of the absolute and 
relative, belonging to the One which might well 
be called Almighty God. 



OLD AGE. 

When age gets old it is in order to investigate. 
Why is it? What is it? "Once upon a time" 
old age was supposed to be part and parcel of 
a "long and honorable life." Indeed it was hard- 
ly respectable not to reach years of decrepitude, 
to say nothing of discretion. The bald gray head, 
the stiff walk, the two canes and the croaking 
voice were looked upon with awe and approval. 
Any one who tried to shirk old age was judged 
abnormal and laughed at until he had properly 
shelved himself. But science is looking into the 
matter today, and things are different. Humanity 
being informed that old age is disease, begins 
to fight shy of the subject; that is, the male half, 
while women fail to advertise their years by the 
shape of their bonnets, as previously they were 
wont to do. 

When I watch an automobile skimming down 
its line of perspective till it fades into apparent 
nonentity, the last thing I lose sight of is its 
emphatically assertive number. Beautiful, defiant 
though it may be, it is nevertheless ticketed like 
a jailbird, and much of its charm vanishes in 
its obtrusive label. Not long since people, by 
certain things they wore or not, conspicuously 



OLD AGE 189 

announced themselves, one to all intents and pur- 
poses proclaimed by some trick of dress, I am 
45; another said 60; another 23. When, like the 
automobile, they vanished down their lines of 
perspective, the last to catch your eye were the 
figures on their backs, mystic but assertive, ad- 
vertising the number of years they had stalked 
earth for prey or otherwise, and just what might 
be expected of them. 

Now that all happened before old age was 
dubbed disease. Since then till date there has 
been a sort of jumble in regard to the whys and 
wherefores of the subject, and people as yet have 
not found their bearings. Woman was the first to 
jump into the ranks of the unconditioned. Mrs. 
Smith was dubious about being the mother of 
Miss Smith, and tried to pass as her sister. Her 
"get up" was utterly changed, not in clothes 
alone, but in physique also. She "thinned down" 
or "plumped out," as the case might require, 
growing younger and younger as time passed, 
much to the chagrin of her daughter, who hardly 
relished this sisterly attitude, secretly feeling like 
an orphan— motherless. Later, however, to get 
even, the said Miss Smith assumed a role, im- 
possible to Mrs. Smith, namely, that of naive 
innocence and youthful simplicity, wearing great 
hairbows and collarless jackets, that proclaimed 
her at once the girl she was. 

Men through contagion by association with 
women, began posing as youngsters also. In the 
great register they falsified their age, some of 
the baldheaded appearing in wigs; their teeth 



190 STRAIGHT GOODS IN PHILOSOPHY 

were reinforced, and their gray sidewhiskers 
shaved off. They even resorted to cold cream 
and violet water. Their trunks encased in 
straight-front corsets, beside their sons they 
looked dapper and well groomed, so much so that 
the younger men were forced to appear as boys, 
lest people mistake their fathers for their brothers. 

And all this because old age is disease, and 
the world resents it. Its respectability went down 
when the old age microbe presented itself to the 
microscope. 

Is science right 1 Are we as humans obliged to 
succumb to old age if we live long enough? Or 
have we been duped all these centuries with the 
false assumption that dignity and decrepitude are 
a noble pair, destined to marry, and the man 
who scorns a "ripe" old age, which ripeness is 
in plain language decay, is insane through vanity 
and self-importance. Some doctors ascribe the 
disease of old age to a microbe, others to a wrong- 
ly constituted anatomy. Whether we know the 
cause or not, we can certainly get at the symp- 
toms. An aged person (I am not referring in 
this category to his years) is brittle in arteries 
and bone, therefore stiff and, in a physical sense, 
gritty. His hair, his eyes, everything about him 
is minus the limberness of youth. He bends with 
an effort, he pants for breath, and his brain in 
time gives way, bringing about senility and "sec- 
ond childhood." It is quite evident that some- 
thing has happened to not only smother the fires 
of youth, but to contract and harden his mortal 
body. Can the mere passing of years do this, or 



OLD AGE 191 

are the experiences which he goes through during 
that time the sole cause! I am greatly inclined to 
believe that certain habits of life will bring about 
such results and certain others will not, time 
being but a factor for the " fixing' ' of them either 
one way or the other. 

The physical microbe that science has found 
in the old age patient, might be well used as a 
symbol of mental bacteria that dominate the mind 
of man and assure him all that decrepitude can 
bring. When young the ordinary individual lays 
his future out in sections, so to speak, primarily 
cutting it up into youth, middle age, rotund elder- 
ness, and "mellow" old age. He looks forward 
to this, and sees himself continually under these 
different guises, which work themselves out into 
physical actuality one by one. This is not only 
a race habit, but a human habit also. He refers 
these changes in himself to the passing of time, 
and he constantly repeats his age to himself and 
to others who are curious enough to ask. He 
puts himself on this shelf, and that by counting 
his years. "I am here because I have lived so 
long, ' ' and here because of ' ' some more. ' ' Other 
people judge him likewise, and he could as easily 
escape a straightjacket, as get off his particular 
perch where he and others have "shelved" him. 
He looks his age too, no mistake about it. He 
is a victim of auto-suggestion, and finds no coun- 
ter hint outside him to change his position. 

Now first let us consider the physical person 
that makes up a good half of the man. As time 
passes and the boy matures, he forgets or is 



192 STRAIGHT GOODS IN PHILOSOPHY 

ignorant that he must change his eating, drink- 
ing and other habits to correspond. While grow- 
ing he had a double task on hand; first to main- 
tain life by the fuel of food, second to add to 
his bodily stature through the substance assimi- 
lated. When this full stature is attained the sec- 
ond process is practically done away with, or 
should be— the first alone being necessary. To 
maintain life the demand and supply must be 
equalized, but the new-made man more likely 
than not, having cultivated a fastidious palate, 
proceeds to gorge food in order to tickle this 
autocrat of his mouth, till the supply is so much 
beyond the demand that he becomes overstocked. 
He keeps this up for years and years, and his 
body, resentful and rebellious, strives in every way 
to unload itself and maintain an equilibrium. For 
a while during the man's prime, when his energy 
is superb, it seems to succeed, but gradually this 
same energy is sapped in the effort, and as time 
passes the accretions overbalance the excretions, 
and slowly but surely the arteries, nerves and 
tissues succumb. Deposits begin to gather, of 
both fat and mineral. To even harbor these ab- 
normal visitors takes strength, and to oust them 
still more. At this point our victim of his palate 
begins the medicine regime. Doctors and doses 
are quite essential to the helping of " nature.' 9 
To " assist nature" and bring about equilibrium 
is the cry of Esculapius. Some little gain is 
made, and if the patient follows his physician's 
advice and lives abstemiously, a real equation 
may be struck and genuine old age escaped; for 



OLD AGE 193 

whatever microbes show themselves at this period 
are as likely to grow out of the environment as 
to cause it, that is, when the environment is con- 
genial the microbe is there. This is the way he 
appears to me— this microbe! A little spectacled 
devil, his bald poll rimmed about with dead hair, 
his eyes blinking rheum, his toothless mouth 
drooling,— a shriveled mummy in epitome, his 
energy all but potential, his voice a ghoulish 
whimper, and himself too frail for the microscopic 
eye. 

Now suppose man started life with an alto- 
gether different standard. In the first place his 
object is prime,— " prime of life," more and more 
prime, and yet still more— nothing but prime. 
Time would be but a factor, enabling him by ex- 
perience to learn better and better how to main- 
tain that prime. For him death lies off some- 
where perhaps, but not old age. He has no more 
idea of harboring it than he has of smallpox or 
plague. Poise and equilibrium would never per- 
mit senility. His one great problem is how to 
keep this balance, what and how much to eat 
and drink. In fact the hygiene of life would be 
the thing to master. Of course he might fail, but 
one thing is certain, the chances of escape from 
the disease— old age, are pre-eminently on his 
side; and after a century of his own and others' 
experience, he would probably learn the law of 
balance so perfectly, and live by it so carefully 
that death would lay a man in his prime in the 
coffin instead of one that had shriveled with years. 

The science of living must be first learned and 



194 STRAIGHT GOODS IN PHILOSOPHY 

then practiced. He deserves a lame old age who, 
knowing the truth, will not abide by it, but eats 
and drinks and is merry at the expense of his 
arteries and to the satisfaction of the bacteria 
that wait like minute buzzards close at hand. 

Now let us look on the other pole of this ques- 
tion—the mental attitude. This continual sug- 
gesting to one's self, "I am getting old, older, 
oldest ;" this 1 holding a mental mirror before one's 
face to watch the lines come in, the crow's feet 
and the cat's claws, and the spider's web,— this 
hunting for brittle gray hairs, this taking of one's 
temperature periodically, and fingering of the 
pulse,— this anticipation of rheumatism and men- 
tal apathy, these all are wonderful helps in bring- 
ing old age to the fore and establishing old time 
traditions. Body and mind interact continually. 
Let either assume an inherited premise as a basis 
of procedure, and the other agrees. Let both, 
however, throw over all preconceived notions that 
are not founded on the law of equilibrium, and 
start out from the substantial base of a funda- 
mental poise, and the union will produce a miracle 
—even perpetual prime. It is not youth that men 
want but prime. They are never satisfied until 
they reach it, and there they really desire to stay. 

But you say, everything grows old,— plants, 
animals, rocks. Do they? There are living trees 
that flourished when history was young. There 
are birds and animals that die when they get 
ready, looking nearly as youthful as when they 
first appeared a century before. But setting this 
aside, I admit that creature life as a rule shows 



OLD AGE 195 

age and decay. And man is a creature, you as- 
sert. Yes, and something more. If the old Bible 
stories are worthy of credence, the man of ancient 
times lived for hundreds of years, still young 
and virile. It is said that in the Orient today 
there are persons attaining a truly great age, 
who still seem equal to things. But whether this 
is so or not, what man has never before done he 
may some time come to do most certainly. It is not 
recorded of the past that he talked with or with- 
out wires, over long distance, but he does it now. 
Nor was he supposed to be able to weigh the 
stars and analyze their substance, but he does 
it now. Nor could he formerly inspect the in- 
side of a human body by an X-ray, but he does 
it now. Nor could he manipulate electricity to 
any extent,— he does it now. Man is a unique 
force in the universe. What he has done is no 
criterion for what he will do. One thing I can 
boldly assert, however: man must make himself 
"fit" for the majestic processional of the undis- 
covered which is now sending its clear voice 
ahead of it in a clarion challenge. No old age 
microbe can be allowed at the gorgeous assem- 
blage about to gather to usher in the New, when 
the "Gaiety of Nations" shall resolve itself into 
the carnival of the world, met to celebrate the 
"Events of the 20th Century." And you— man, 
if you would be a guest, must be in your prime 
and wear your best clothes. Your ' ' claw hammer 
swallow tail," without padding. No second-hand 
coat pinned up into imitation of the real thing 
will pass you into the assembly where Modern 



196 STRAIGHT GOODS IN PHILOSOPHY 

Science holds court. Science has caught the old 
age microbe and has it fast on the slide of the 
microscope, and in its place has presented you 
with the formula for sane and temperate living 
sexually and gastronomically. She bids you hold 
your tongue about your age, lest through auto 
suggestion you bring in gray hairs. Women al- 
ready have learned to keep still, and men are 
taking lessons. Science instructs you not to tabu- 
late yourselves or wear a ticketed sum-total of 
your years on your back. She tells you to eat 
less and drink more (that is, pure water). Alto- 
gether the art of living has been reduced to a 
system plus spontaneity, which is the essence of 
life itself. 

If you, still, in the light of this dictum, deter- 
mine to carry your two canes, may the snows 
of winter descend on your devoted head, for thus 
"it is spoken' ' by shivering Age himself, whose 
crow's feet clutch at your sunken eyelids while 
he reiterates the old-time traditions as the days 
and weeks and years go by. 



OUR BLESSINGS. 

A commonplace subject, you remark, and one 
about which much cant sentimentalism has been 
expressed. Yes, perhaps, but there may never- 
theless be other aspects to the question. Even 
the most everyday problems are interesting when 
studied from a rational point of view, and I wish 
particularly to discuss this one because of the 
attitude taken by mankind generally as to the 
values in life balanced against the disturbances. 
Men complain from sunrise till sunset, growl, 
kick, rebel and condemn; but seldom do we find 
a person glorifying things from dawn to dusk. 
The modern pessimist gets up at daybreak and 
commences a revolt that continues till he goes to 
bed again. The weather, the country, his neigh- 
bor, his health, all come in for a share of con- 
demnation. " Things have come to a pretty 
pass," his "head aches like the deuce," his 
"finances are all going to smash," "the world 
hasn't a grain of horse sense and never will have," 
"the devil's to pay when women mix up in things 
that don't concern them," "life isn't worth living, 
anyhow," and "if there's a hereafter" he wants 
no stock in it; and so on and so on, week in and 
week out. 



198 STRAIGHT GOODS IN PHILOSOPHY 

Now imagine an optimist facing the east at 
sunrise, thrilling with delight. "Lucky dog!" he 
exclaims, "what rapture to be simply alive! How 
fortunate that I can see such glory as the sun 
brings. I pity any one who lacks power to appre- 
ciate this wonder." Before meals he bows his 
head. "How good it is to just eat and drink; 
health is of value inestimable; to breathe is a 
pleasure, and to move, think and act, is something 
beyond compare." Even hard knocks serve as 
a vital stimulus to his cheerful spirit. "Fine for 
me," he says; "sun looks the brighter because of 
the shadows;" "all things work together for 
good;" "might as well be dead as not happy;" 
"0 but this living is something worth while!" 

The optimist like the pessimist may exaggerate 
conditions, but the ordinary individual as a rule 
inclines more to fault-finding than complaisance, 
utterly ignoring the good things provided for 
him, or if not ignoring, accepting them as his 
just due. 

Now suppose a man started from a new base 
regarding his estimate of life, and for every evil 
flying over his head looked for a good to foil 
it,— a blackbird and whitebird skimming the 
blue side by side. If the morning is "cold 
enough to freeze me," the fire in the grate is 
"hot enough to keep me warm." If I am nearly 
starved, I find my food delicious. Disgusted 
with being sick, I am glad that there are doctors. 
Having lost my money, the work which I 
previously hated looms up as a blessing. Driven 
into the house by the storm outside, I appreciate 



OUE BLESSINGS 199 

fully the comforts of home. Driven out by ener- 
vating luxury, I enjoy again the tough, hard, 
spacious world. And if this be true, why can 
I not sometimes say so? Am I ashamed to be 
thankful? Is it disgraceful to acknowledge that 
I appreciate and often really enjoy the things of 
life? In Germany you are told to rap on wood 
if you have dared to boast that matters are pros- 
pering, lest the demon of ill luck, "watching 
out" and biding its time, change your course of 
events for the worse. I believe there is a little 
imp of good luck also, who is only too glad to 
polish your reflecting lamp that you may see 
the glamour in life in lieu of the gloom. As be- 
fore said in this book, the sun is the real fact; 
shadows are but effigies made by things that 
strive to put out the light of day. And if the 
sun is the real, then the cheerful person is cer- 
tainly one of sound sense, while the growler is 
out of tune with cosmic harmonics. The man 
who recognizes his blessings has discovered the 
very source and maintained of life, while he who 
realizes his miseries only, is hypnotized by a fic- 
kle medium that has neither stability nor leading 
place in the scheme of things. I am not exalting 
the grinning optimist who sees no shade what- 
ever, for the shadow is inevitable and rightful, 
"worth what it is worth," and cannot be ignored. 
All that I contend for is a proper placing of 
values. Gold is gold, and tin is tin. The opti- 
mist who exalts tin to the rank of gold, and the 
pessimist who degrades gold to the class of base 
metal, are not quite level-headed nor excusable. 



200 STEAIGHT GOODS IN PHILOSOPHY 

The person today who is looked upon as man- 
ly and square is the stoic of modern stripe 1 , who 
seems to be enduring untold miseries without 
uttering a word of complaint. My dear man, 
your whole attitude is a stubborn protest. You 
are not undergoing one whit more misery than 
are your brothers, and yet you appear like a 
veritable Atlas carrying the big round world on 
your shoulders. You grit your teeth and bear— 
what? No more than your child bears or your 
wife or your friend, who grumbles one moment 
and thanks the Lord the next. Your silence is 
a challenge to the Universe. You would die 
rather than admit that you ever had been or 
ever could be blessed. Nothing that comes to 
you in the guise of good is worth considering in 
comparison with that which is bad. Your lips 
make a straight line set firmly. Smile? Not you! 
Why should you! As a stoic you despise the 
grumbler who talks and growls. You are a man! 
you will utter no word of protest, but simply 
endure. Ha! ha! I verily believe that the per- 
son of sharp tongue is better than you, and 
fairer. Your pride, sir, is ridiculous. 

Now the right thinking individual is not going 
to cross a bridge till he comes to it, nor find 
a stream till he gets there. The sane man doesn't 
die but once in a lifetime, and while he lives 
he enjoys all he can. He is not a pretender. If 
things are bad he says so, but finds the good in 
them if possible. If things are good he admits the 
fact and shouts Hurrah and Glory Hallelujah, 
not a bit ashamed of his exuberance. It is no 



OUR BLESSINGS 201 

disgrace to revel in sunlight, for the source of 
the rays is reliable and life-giving. The sane 
person is a frank, disillusioned individual, who 
can dance around the maypole on a bright spring 
morning and attend a funeral, if he must, in the 
afternoon. 

There is a false idea of manliness afloat that 
permits the cultivation of two types of humanity, 
either of which is a disgrace to the standard 
conceived. One is the disgruntled grumbler, 
who will not acknowledge his blessings though 
they meet him half way, and the other is the 
haughty stoic, who is enduring things and en- 
during them still more, going on and on weighted 
with woe, as though he were the only sufferer 
on the planet and the human herd were created 
for the purpose of witnessing his heroism and 
pain. He does not know, perhaps, that no camel 
can carry "the last straw,' ' and no man more 
than he is able. "Our shoulders are fitted to 
our burdens,' ' if not, the load will fall off. The 
baby with his childish trouble is proportionately 
as much afflicted, as is his suffering parent with 
his larger capacity for endurance. The ant, com- 
paratively speaking, is as great a drudge as a 
working elephant. The power to endure and the 
thing we have to bear belong to each other or 
they will surely be divorced. The statesman who 
bends before heavy responsibilities is no more 
overweighted than is his affectionate wife who 
carries him on her heart. It is all a question of 
capacities and equalization. So why should one 
complain more than another, at least about that 



202 STKAIGHT GOODS IN PHILOSOPHY 

which has com© to him legitimately through his 
own acts. Of course there are times when an 
individual has misfortunes "piled on" him, 
while another seems to go "scot-free." In the 
"long run," however— and the "long run" may- 
be very long— equilibrium is struck, and human 
beings, by the intrinsic nature of their acts in 
life, get a "just deal" and a fair surplus of 
blessings. 

In judging, pitying and congratulating each 
other, we fail to see "round the corner" and 
through the mistakes engendered by our short- 
sighted eyes, reach false estimates and wrong 
conclusions. With the glance spying for evil in- 
stead of good, the 20th Century is likely to be- 
come pessimistic and a menace to itself. Our 
youngsters strutting the streets decrying life 
and stoutly proclaiming that they never asked 
to be born, our older folk wondering if "any- 
thing is really worth while don't you know," our 
superb appropriation of the good things of earth, 
without earning them or showing the slightest 
recognition of their values, all go to show that 
individualism is becoming precociously conceited 
and needs humbling by the reactions bound to 
follow such absurd assertiveness. 



THE PAST. 

"Bury the past!" Why? Perhaps if it were 
dead this advice would be sensible, but as that 
which is seemingly lost is in reality with us, 
assertive and often obtrusive, it would be im- 
possible to annihilate it by an attempted burial. 
If we could shut our doo* on the past we should 
have to begin life all over again and learn our 
A-B-C's. A blank behind us would mean a blank 
present,— our minds as vacant as an unfurnished 
house. The past follows us like a fawning dog; 
and whines for recognition continuously. It is 
not only built into us bodily, but helps to stock 
our inner sanctuary with objectivities, which play 
over and over the drama,— farces and tragedies 
enacted before in the outside world. 

To be sure, we forget temporarily, but for- 
getting is not the destruction of our past any 
more than is sleep. Horrible or beautiful, evil 
or good, the past is incorporated into our being 
and cannot be lastingly escaped. So then, in- 
stead of trying to run away from it, why not 
face it squarely and see what can be made out 
of it. 

It is said that the past is fixed, changeless,— 
but is this really so? Surely a thing done is 



• 



204 STRAIGHT GOODS IN PHILOSOPHY 

done, but nevertheless as it relates to our present 
consciousness we may find in it, after all the 
element of change. "But how?" you ask. Sup- 
pose a man committed a murder a few years 
ago, under sudden impulse unaccountable to him- 
self. There being extenuating circumstances, 
the case is one of manslaughter, and he gets off 
with a light sentence. But within, his soul is 
racked with horror. The act is done, nothing 
can change that, and he stands out before his 
own interior eyes as a hopelessly guilty being 
without a shade of excuse. Now as far as the 
killing goes, no change in the past takes place; 
the victim is dead. But as far as he himself is 
concerned, a vast difference in the past looms 
up, making his whole attitude at the time of the 
deed appear utterly changed. He has learned 
from his mother that during her pregnancy 
before he was born she suffered from homicidal 
mania, due to causes not her fault apparently, 
which made it almost impossible to resist the 
committing of such acts as her son later carried 
out. His whole past under the light of this 
revelation appears in new aspect. As far as he 
is concerned it is changed. In reality, of course, 
all these facts were intact, under cover, but as 
a past is no past unless recognized in conscious- 
ness, to him it was changed. Not that only; pos- 
sibly some other revelation will serve to alter 
it still more, that is, put his deed in a still 
different light. 

Two lovers break troth and marry outsiders, 
each blaming and hating the other for the spoiled 



THE PAST 205 

years which seem to be a black cloud over their 
lives. The past to them is fixed, a grim per- 
spective, which they believe can never be 
changed, when a third party or hidden enemy 
reveals the fact that certain letters, putting new 
light on the question of their love affair and 
completely exonerating the betrothed couple, had 
been intercepted and destroyed by him. Instant- 
ly the black past glows with sunshine. The fact 
that they separated stands, but the other con- 
cealed fact that caused the break restores their 
former good will and trust. Nothing new really 
happened except in the consciousness of the par- 
ties concerned; something out of sight had ap- 
peared, that was all. But as far as they were 
affected, their past was entirely altered. 

In finality of facts the past is fixed and 
changeless; in reality of experience it is a gleam- 
ing chameleon. We did things ten years ago, 
that as they receded into the realm of "past- 
ness" grew different and different with the 
widening of our conception of ourselves and 
their bearings upon us. As a man grows away 
from his childhood his acts take on quite a 
reverse color from that of years before. He sees 
the meaning of a child as such, which he did not 
realize when he first grew out of childish con- 
ditions. In fact he generalizes on childhood, 
and his former griefs now amuse him, his former 
punishments make him smile, his past that once 
seemed so unfair now appears reasonable and 
what he deserved. After leaving young man- 
hood and merging into prime, the past of youth 



206 STKAIGHT GOODS IN PHILOSOPHY 

changes. His insane passions seem inexcusable to 
him, his rampant egotism disgusting, he wonders 
how people tolerated him. When he reaches age, 
these same young years will change yet more, his 
mental eyes as he looks back see farther and 
better. His youth appears heroic, sad, charming; 
he admires what he once detested; he gets a 
larger grasp on the young fellow of himself, and 
realizes his charm. 

To sum up then, our past is fixed and our past 
is changeable— an arrant contradiction apparent- 
ly. From the potentiality of things in being, 
the past is unalterable as far as the fact and act 
go; as fact and act simply, no change is possible; 
"it is spoken;' ' "it is done." But from the 
point of the human understanding of such act 
and fact, the comprehension of their relation to 
each other and the environment under which 
they were worked out, they are ever changing 
as the intellect of man expands to a larger and 
clearer grasp on the subject. "If I had known 
you as I do now, I should have seen your past 
in quite a different light," one friend says to 
another. Now suppose, for the sake of a longer 
backward perspective, that we live life upon life 
on earth. By the law of evolution or reincar- 
nation our deeds of the years behind in this 
present existence would take on quite a new as- 
pect if the light of "beforehand" gleamed over 
them. The causes for the effects born in this 
stage of our existence would intrude their 
shadowy forms upon us, re-relating the acts of 
our nearby past in quite a new manner. Some 



THE PAST 207 

ghost of the Orient, or the far North would polish 
or dull the stones in the chain of events just 
gone, bringing out jewels or pebbles in an unex- 
pected way. 

I do not believe in trying to shut out the past. 
In the first place it cannot be done, in the sec- 
ond place it is not fair. The coward ignores his 
unhappy years and tries to look upon them as 
"escaped," but the brave man faces about 
periodically and glances scrutinizingly behind 
him, and sometimes, much to his satisfaction, 
his broadening comprehension reveals himself to 
himself as never before, and by the revelation 
gives him a better insight into the future. No 
man can be a prophet who fears what is past. He 
only can look ahead who can gaze steadfastly 
back. By realizing to some extent what he was, 
he may alter and improve what he is and there- 
fore what he is yet to be. 



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